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People in Threes Going Up in Smoke and Other Triplicities
in Russian Literature and Culture
Lee B. Croft
Arizona State University
"I knew she wasn't Russian when she said she told
her husband to honk the car horn four times as
a signal that he had arrived outside the studio.
If she were really a Russian, she would have told
her husband to honk three times."
-- Dr. Roy Hanu Hart1
"Is there a limited number of 'letters' in the language
of quantum electrodynamics that can be combined
to form 'words' and 'phrases' that describe nearly
every phenomenon of nature? The answer is yes:
the number is three."
-- Richard Feynman2
"What is the artist if he is not a triple thinker?"
-- Gustave Flaubert3
In the article,
"Triplicity and Textual Iconicity: Russian Literature Through a Triangular
Prism," I advance a theory of narrative efficiency based on the capacity
of the human mind for processing information to explain the inordinate
pervasity of triplicity in Russian language and culture.4 I argue that the
Russian culture is
particularly susceptible to seeing things in threes, to tricategorization, to
tertiariness of all kinds, and that Russian forms of narration, both spoken and
written, are particularly rife with triplicity. This goes well beyond the
triplicity inherent in most cultures -- the philosophical religious and
physiological/psychoanalytic triads (mind, body, spirit; father, son, holy
spirit; space, time, change; hell, earth, heaven; id, ego, superego; old brain,
mid brain, outer cortex), the physical/electrodynamic/genetic triads (width,
depth, height; gravity, time, mass/energy; combinatorial triplets of
nucleotides), and semiotic system triads (icon, index, symbol; perception
(stimulus), analysis, response) -- to more characteristically Slavic/Russian aspects
of cultural triplicity. I am trying to demonstrate the special intensity
of triplicity in Russian culture, the special density
of it in Russian spoken and written narration.
Characteristic Russian aspects include the tripartite Russian personal identification
by name (first name, patronymic, last name). The last name differentiates one's
membership in a family (clan, or extended Slavic "zadruga"), distinct
from other family units; the patronymic (paternalistically based on the
father's first name) gives generational membership within the family and
differentiates one and one's siblings from cousins; and the first name (and its
gradations) provides a unique identity (and possible characterization) marker
within the family unit. Other cultures do not share this tertiary system of
personal naming. There is also an impressively rife tertiariness of Russian
grammatical categorization, a reflection of the structure of Russian thought:
there are (or were) three numbers (singular, dual, plural), tenses (past, present,
future), voices (active, middle, passive), degrees of comparison (simple,
comparative, superlative), moods (indicative, subjunctive, injunctive), aspects
(durative, iterative, perfective), sentence types (declarative, interrogative,
exhortative), genders (feminine, masculine, neuter), persons (first, second,
third), ... declensional types (masculine/neuter, feminine I, feminine II),
conjugational stress patterns (stem, desinence, switching). Surely the
dominance of triplicity in grammatical categorization is not merely fortuitous.
It is a consequence of the way [Russians] think. (Croft, "Triplicity"
251)5
Examples of triplicity in
Russian literature, and in the forms of oral narration which preceded
literature, are especially easy to find. Vladimir Propp, the Russian formalist
literary critic who gave us the extremely structured Morphology of the
Folktale, devotes an entire section of his seminal work to
"trebling" and how it
may occur among individual details of an attributive nature (the three heads of a
dragon), as well as among individual functions, pairs of functions
(pursuit-rescue), groups of functions, and entire moves. Repetition may appear
as a uniform distribution (three tasks, three years' service), as an
accumulation (the third task is the most difficult, the third battle the
worst), or may twice produce negative results before the third, successful,
outcome. (Propp 74)
In The Uses of Enchantment:The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,
psychologist Bruno Bettelheim writes that "the
number three in fairy tales often seems to refer to what in psychoanalysis is
viewed as the three aspects of the mind: id, ego, and superego" (102). The
tales, in Bettelheim's view, are designed to parallel the struggle of these
three forces within the developing personality of the young listener. In the
tale, the id's unconscious energy seeks release: a primary drive (old-brain or
limbic system, physiologically) must be satisfied. Human conflicts result. The
tale then introduces elements which represent the ego's (mid-brain,
physiologically) attempts to satisfy the id's demands within the requirements
of conscious external reality. These attempts, of course, are doomed to failure
without the role of the superego (the cerbral cortex, physiologically), which
introduces a sense of moral right and wrong and the uniquely human ability to
sacrifice self-interest for the sake of others. The fairytale protagonist, the
hero, who eventually succeeds and triumphs in the conflict, is the one who, in
contradistinction to others, acts on the level of the superego. This is the
very purpose of the fairy tale -- to teach the young listener the value of (1)
self-sacrificing actions, (2) the value of an over-riding morality, and (3) the
appropriate sense of right and wrong.6
When Russia developed literacy and then literature, the narrative techniques which
had evolved as parts of the oral genres (e.g., the byliny and the skazki) were
carried over into textual structures. Triplicity, accordingly, became an
integral part of the written story. In the twelfth-century epic Lay of
Igor's Campaign, the upstart Prince
Igor and his three relative princes -- Vsevolod, Oleg, and Sviatoslav --
encounter and, unfortunately, disregard a bad omen, an eclipse of the sun which
occurs three days into their journey of conquest. Sergei Zenkovsky analyzes
this very complex early literary work by pointing out:
Three distinct structural planes may be discerned in the Lay. The first
concerns the destiny of Prince Igor, his
campaign, defeat, and escape from the Kumans. This plane, the narrative core of
the work, is somewhat clouded by invocations to the late bard, Boyan,
reminiscences of past glory, and the allusive atmosphere of foreboding. The
second plane consists of portents and lamentations over the outcome of the
campaign and Russia's fate, such as the dream of Prince Sviatoslav of Kiev and
the lament of Yaroslavna, the wife of Igor. The final plane consists of the
author's admonition to the princes to unite, and his censure of their fighting.
(168)
We can see here also that Russian critic Zenkovsky's literary analysis is as fraught
with triplicity as
the literary subject itself: his perception of "[1] three [2] distinct [3]
structural planes"; Prince Igor's "[1] campaign, [2] defeat, and [3]
escape"; the "invocations to [1] the late bard, Boyan, [2]
reminiscences of past glory, and [3] the allusive atmosphere of
foreboding." Indeed this kind of meta-triplicity, the product of a
subliminal eisegesis or mimesis (if not overtly deliberate as abiding by a
widespread "rhetorical convention" of supporting every theme of a
thesis with three examples or points of support), is not rare in Russian
literary criticism. Consider Roman Osipovich Jakobson's excursis on an ancient
Russian treatise titled The Colloquy on Teaching Letters. This work is thoroughly
infused with triplicity by
an unknown author, likely a monk, trying to make a correlation between the
word's relationship with the human soul and human reason and the Son's
relationship with God the Father and the Holy Spirit -- "a polemic,"
Jakobson explains, "against the anti-trinitarian sects of the fifteenth
century." But Jakobson begins his "Acknowledgements and
Dedication" of this section with the following sentence, composed of three
triads of differing (one successive, one elaborative, one specificative,
including, like a fairy tale, two negative rejections before the final positive
acceptance) tri-elemental increments:
The Moscow Linguistic School [a tripartite name], [1] faithful to the [2] precepts
of its [3] founder, Filipp Fedorovich Fortunatov [a tripartite name], has been
destined to [1] elucidate, [2] substantiate, and [3] develop his view that
language is [1] not a mere "external cover in regard to the phenomena of
thought" and [2] not only a "means for the expression of ready-made
ideas," but [3] first and foremost it is "an implement for
thinking." (Selected Writings II 365)7
Was Jakobson influenced to express this triplicity by simple rhetorical convention?
Was it because of the
influence of the textually proximate triplistic work he was analyzing? Or was
it because he, a supreme Russian scholar with the narrative goal of
edification, was subject to the same forces governing the narrative techniques
of the author he studied? The answer is probably all three.
In his preface to the second edition of his verse translation into English of
Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin,
Walter Arndt writes that the great "novel-in-verse" is concerned, as [Vladimir]
Nabokov has put it, with the "afflictions, affections, and
fortunes of three young men -- Onegin, the bitter lean fop; Lensky, the
tempermental minor poet; and Pushkin, their friend -- and of three young ladies
-- Tatyana, Olga, and Pushkin's muse".... There are three settings (the
country estates, Moscow, St. Petersburg) ... and the author plays a triple role
-- that of narrator, or an acquaintance of the hero, and of a character in the
poem.8
One might well point out
here also that Vladimir Nabokov's characterization of the "afflictions,
affections, and fortunes" of a "bitter lean fop" and a
"tempermental minor poet" is concomitantly rife with the same
triplicity it describes. Surely it is more than merely curious that criticism
often mirrors its object. It's simply that the narrative goal of literature and
the narrative goal of criticism of literature is the same: maximal message
impact on the reader. So it is not surprising that both should share triplicity
as a structural aspect.9
There is a saying in the Russian culture that some stories are good enough "to
tell three times" ("skazka/istoriia ... dostoina tri raza
skazyvat"). But it's three times and three times only -- twice is not
enough and four times exhausts the story and makes it trite, reflecting poorly
on the story-teller. This may be a superstition, like "spitting three
times" ("T'fu-T'fu-T'fu") over the left shoulder to remove the
hex or jinx of the evil eye ("durnoi glaz"). But it's evident in
Russian literature as well as in oral story telling. If one surveys the collected
works of the great poet, Mikhail Lermontov, for example, one finds that he
decided to give the title "Molitva" ("Prayer") to precisely
three of his poems: "Do not blame me, Almighty" (1829), "I,
Mother of God, am now in prayer" (1837), and "In difficult times of
life" (1839).10 Three times, and
three times only, did Lermontov give this very title to his poems on religious
aspects of his life. There are also three poems titled "Zvezda"
("Star"), three poems with "Smert'" ("Death") in
the title, and three poems with "Poet" in the title. This could be
considered coincidental, but I don't think so. I think that titling is an
important aspect of narration and, as such, is also subject to the triadic
doctrine of narrative efficiency. Indeed I would suggest a new line of
bibliometrics wherein the Ïuvre of other great Russian literati is scanned for
such titular triples.
Nikolai Gogol is an author whose work is rife with triplicity. In his Dead Souls
he likens Russia to a "Troika, winged troika ... that none can overtake"
(Nabokov 112-113).11 He declares that "Lo,
the troika has [1] wings, [2] wings, [3] wings" and later " [1] steeds, [2] steeds,
[3] and more steeds." Gleb Zhekulin in his article "Rereading Gogol's
'Viy'" describes Gogol's "favourite ... the fundamental device of
triplication":
Three students set out on their journey: Tiberii Gorobets, Khoma Brut, and Khaliava;
for three nights Khoma reads in the church -- these are the visible, obvious
instances of triplication, but there are other, less noticeable instances: on
his return to Kiev after his witch-ride, Khoma passed ... some three times
through the market; the church in which the body of the pannochka-ved'ma was
lying had three conical cupolas; the old witch
approaches Khoma in the shed three times before she catches him; when Mikita's
experiences with the witch are mentioned, three men want to tell the story;
only three of the sotnik's servants are known to us by their names, Evtukh,
Dorosh, and Spirid; and, at the very end of the story, Khaliava, drinking his
third tankard, pronounces a eulogy of Khoma: "He was a splendid man, was
Khoma! A magnificent man! And he was ruined for nothing." (302)12
Zhekulin also points out
that Gogol's syntax too "often falls into patterns of three. Thus the
young widow who gives shelter to Khoma on his return to Kiev used to sell
'ribbons, rifle-shot and wheels'; the little church was 'wooden, blackened, and
carpeted with green moss.'" Further, Zhekulin points out three successive
permutations of the same sentence, paragraphs consisting of "three
sentences of similar syntactical construction," and sentences composed of
"three subordinate clauses." He clearly demonstrates that the
thematic triplicity, evident in the plot and in the opposition of the
characters, is rendered through triads of sentences, many of tertiary
syntactical structure, and with triple strings of adjectives. Structure in
support of content is nowhere more emphatic than with triplicity (Zhekulin
303).
By the 1830s Nikolai Gogol had become aware of a particular "story worth telling
three times": the story of spontaneous human combustion. Stories of
spontaneous human combustion had entered the literature of the romantic period
from sources in France and Italy. The concept exists in many cultures. Even in
Hawaiian lore, we learn that the early 19th-century King Kamehameha's fear of
Kaua'i's tributary King Kaumuali'i was based on Kaumualii's knowledge of an
incantation called the "Aneekapuahi" which, if uttered in an
adversary's presence, would cause that adversary's spontaneous incineration
(Joesting 58). Early American literature includes an episode of it. Charles
Brockden Brown's popular Gothic romance, Wieland; or the Transformation (1798)
includes an episode of spontaneous human
combustion, and later descriptions appear in Herman Melville's Redburn and
Charles Dickens' Bleak House (Croft, "Spontaneous" 335-347). In Gogol's
particular view, spontaneous human combustion was part of the malicious
workings of the Devil. He decided to include an episode of it in his story
"St. John's Eve" from the collection Village Evenings Near Dikanka
(1831-32). The character "Petro
the orphan" marries the beautiful Pidorka after complying with a demand by
the Demon Basavriuk and a witch helper to kill Pidorka's younger brother Ivas
in order to acquire a fortune in gold coins. But Ivas reappears when the witch
is summoned by Pidorka to cure Petro's dejection of forgetfulness about his
heinous act. When Petro sees the witch, he
let out a shreik of laughter that struck fear into Pidorka's heart. "I've remembered!
I've remembered!" he shouted with uncanny glee, and seizing hold of an
axe, swung it with all his might at the old woman. The axe sank two inches into
the oak door. The old woman disappeared into thin air and a child of about
seven, clad in a white shirt, with his head covered by a sheet, suddenly
appeared in the middle of the room ...the sheet dropped from his head.
"Ivas!" cried Pidorka and rushed across to the boy; but the vision was enveloped from
head to foot in blood and flooded the hut with a red light.... In terror she
ran out of the hut; but then, recovering her senses somewhat, she turned back
to help the boy; in vain! The door had slammed shut so hard behind her that she
couldn't open it. People came running up; they pounded on the door, and then
broke it down, but there wasn't a soul inside. The entire hut was full of
smoke, and in the middle, where Petro had stood, lay a heap of ashes, still
giving off wisps of smoke. They rushed to the bags of gold -- but instead of
coins they only contained broken shards of pottery. Their eyes popping from
their heads and their mouths agape, the Cossacks stood rooted to the spot,
afraid even to twitch their moustaches. (48-49)
A paragraph later, Gogol's
narrator explains, "that wasn't the end of the matter. The very same day
that the Devil took Petro to himself, Basavriuk reappeared in the village ...
he was none other than Satan himself, and had taken human form in order to get
his hands on hidden treasure" (49).
"St. John's Eve" is a powerfully scary story, and it garnered for Gogol his
early reputation as a teller of supernatural tales. The episode of spontaneous
human combustion was an important aspect of his narration, infusing the story
with a terrifying manifestation of the "Devil's will." But Gogol was
not done with the story of spontaneous human combustion. He included another
episode of it into the story "Vii" from the Mirgorod collection
(1835, rewritten in 1842). This is the
same story treated above for its triplicity. In "Vii," the seminarian
Khoma Brut is asked to pray over the body of the deceased daughter of a local
Cossack commander. But this daughter was, according to the three Cossacks --
Evtukh, Dorosh, and Spirid -- a witch (actually a "gentleman's
daughter-witch" or "pannochka-ved'ma"), as evidenced by their
story of what happened to Mikita the Dog-keeper when he dallied with her.
Once her ladyship came to the stables where he was grooming a horse. Come here,
Mikita, she says, let me put my foot on your shoulder. And -- fool that he is
-- he obliges: don't stop at that, he says, get right up on my back. The
mistress raised her foot and the moment he saw her naked, white leg he was
completely bamboozled. The silly dolt bent down and, grabbing hold of her naked
legs with his two hands, galloped away like a horse across the field, and he
hadn't a notion afterwards where they went; only he came home more dead than
alive, and from that day on he was withered as a dead stick; then one fine day
they went to the stables and what do they find? -- a heap of ashes and an empty
bucket: he'd burst into flames, and burnt to a cinder. But you ask anyone,
there wasn't a better dog-keeper anywhere in the world. (391)13
Later it is the gentleman's
daughter-witch ("pannochka-ved'ma") who, while Khoma is praying for
her soul, rises up from her coffin to summon "Vii," the demonic
monster with eyelids drooping to the ground who steals Khoma's soul through eye
contact when his gnome minions lift his eyelids to expose his eyes. Again, the
episode of spontaneous human combustion is associated with the work of the Devil.
Gogol's third and last telling of the story of spontaneous human combustion is found in
his great novel, Dead Souls (Part
I, 1842). His con-man Chichikov is trying to purchase from a host of greedy and
incompetent landowners (the real "Dead Souls") the legal titles to
the landowners' serfs or "souls" who have died since the last census.
He intends to use these titles as collateral to obtain a large bank loan and
then default on the loan and abscond with the money. But the landowners he
encounters are reluctant to sell him the titles to their dead serfs, even
though the sale would lessen their tax burden. Chichikov asks one of these
landowners, Mrs. Korobochka, "Have any of your serfs died?" Her answer
shows her to be more concerned with her serfs' services than with their lives:
Oh, my good friend, eighteen of them! ... And they were all such nice people, such
good workers. True, since then some new ones have been born, but what's the
good of that; they're all so young and yet the tax assessor came and demanded
that I pay so much per soul. So the people are dead and I have to pay for them
as if they were alive. Last week my blacksmith was burned to death. He was such
a good blacksmith and a quite skilled locksmith as well.
And Mrs. Korobochka continues:
God has spared me that calamity -- a fire would have been even worse. No, he burned
all by himself, the blacksmith. Something caught fire inside him. He had too
much to drink, and there was a blue flame escaping from him, and he kept
smoldering and smoldering and then went all black like charcoal -- and yet what
a good blacksmith he used to be! And now I can't go driving -- no one to shoe
the horses. (59-60)
So, Nikolai Gogol thrice and
only thrice tells the tale of spontaneous human combustion in his works.
Likely, he considered it a most intense story to tell once, still powerful to
tell twice, and even thrice: but, after that, no more. The story's narrative
utility was, in his mind, exhausted.
Fyodor Dostovevsky's works are replete with triplicity. In line with the titular
triples in the works by Lermontov given above, I note that Dostoevsky has three
works with titles including the word "zapiski" ("notes"): Zapiski
iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the House of the Dead, 1862); Zimnie
zapiski o letnikh vpechatleniyakh (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 1863);
and Zapiski iz podpol'ia (Notes from the Underground, 1864), published in
three successive years.14 His Notes from the Underground
begins with these three famous sentences: "Ia chelovek bol'noi. Ia zloi
chelovek. Neprivlekatel'nyi ia chelovek." Each of these three sentences is
composed of three words and each sentence presents these words in three
different orders: 1) subject, predicate noun, adjective; 2) subject, adjective,
predicate noun; and 3) adjective, subject, predicate noun. In his "A Brief
Note on the Translation," translator Michael Katz, who states right off
that "of all the works of nineteenth-century Russian literature I have
translated, without doubt Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground
remains the most challenging," most adeptly
relates the peculiar ordering of the words in these first three sentences to
the characterization of the work's fictional narrator and to the work's
dominant themes: individuality, humanity, and the effects of personal
character. After presenting ten previous translations of these three sentences
into English, Katz translates them as "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful
man. I am an unattractive man."
Triplicity in Dostoevsky's works is well shown in William Woodin Rowe's article, "Crime
and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov: Some Comparative
Observations." This article details for five pages the amazing "scope
of triplicity" in both these Dostoevsky novels. Here is a sample of Rowe's
description of the plots:
Perhaps most fatefully of all, triplicity informs the descriptions of murder in both
novels. At his "third meeting" with Ivan, Smerdyakov describes the
murder in The Brothers Karamazov.
He hit Fyodor Pavlovich three times, he claims, with a paperweight weighing
about three pounds. The third blow broke the latter's skull and he collapsed,
whereupon Smerdyakov took the 3000 rubles from an envelope closed by "three
large red wax seals."
Raskolnikov [in Crime and Punishment], who has pawned with Alyona a ring "with
three red stones," gains entrance in response to his "third" ring at his
third visit to Alyona's, after which he hits her three times (hoping to steal 3000 rubles).
As with Smerdyakov, his third and last blow breaks the skull. Dostoevsky seems
intrigued by this "third-of-three death patterning": in The
Brothers Karamazov, Father Ferapont claims to have killed a devil by making the sign of
the cross three times; in Crime and Punishment ... Svidrigailov
kills himself with the third shot of a three-shot pistol. (Rowe,
"Crime" 338-339)15
In his earlier article, "Dostoevskian Patterned Antimony and Its Function in
Crime and Punishment," Rowe states that
Dostoevsky "creates antimonic effects by means of a three-stage
formulation which may be likened to the swinging of a pendulum from one side to
the other and then at least partially back" (287). He cites Leonid
Grossman's work, "Dostoevskii-Khudozhnik" ("Dostoevsky the
Artist"), to establish the triplistic nature of this patterning in other
works of Dostoevsky.
Describing what he deems the main characteristic of Dostoevsky's "structural
system," Leonid Grossman notes a tendency in the novels to reveal a tragic
situation gradually "in three meetings or three conversations of the
heroes." This conduces, he observes, to a careful thematic development
"in a little trilogy," a "concise three-act drama" with
increasing (1) suspense, (2) horror, and (3) revelations. (Rowe, "Crime" 341)
An example of this
tripartite Dostoevskian antimony (i.e. the "pendulum swinging from one
side to the other and then at least partially back") is to be found in Crime
and Punishment where the detective
Porfirii Petrovich looks at the murderer Raskol'nikov and "with a kind of
obvious mockery" screws up his eyes "as if winking at him."
Here, "both reader and Raskol'nikov are led to believe that Porfirii (1)
seemed to wink, (2) may not have, and (3) probably did" wink, engendering
in Raskol'nikov the conclusion that Porfirii is "(1) wrong, (2) right,
[or] (3) slightly wrong" (Rowe, "Dostoevskian" 290).
This tripartite antimony is thematically evident in Dostoevsky's novel, Besy
(Demons, 1871-72), a "novel in three parts." In her article, "The Absence
of Historical Time in Dostoevsky's Besy," Dawn Seckler mentions parallel
triplistic themes in Dostoevsky's
work: life, death, and resurrection (Christ-like behavior of his characters);
crime, confession, redemption; paradise, being cast out of paradise, return to
a partial paradise. In Besy, Seckler writes, Dostoevsky's main character
Stavrogin "becomes involved
with three of the novel's female characters -- Liza Nikolaevna, Daria Pavlovna,
and Maria Timofeevna." In the chapters "Night" and "Night
(continued)," Dostoevsky describes Stavrogin's "trek from his home
[1] to Kirillov's, then [2] to Shatov's, along Bogoiavlenskaia Street, and [3]
to the Lebiadkins'" and she comments:
That there are three, and not two or four, references to the dark and rainy weather
is significant. Dostoevsky trebles elements of both description and action:
just as references to the conditions outside are made three times in these two
chapters, Stavrogin comes into contact with Fed'ka the convict three times. The
first, figurative, "meeting" occurs when Petr Verkhovenskii mentions
Fed'ka's presence in the town to Stavrogin. The second and third meetings are
literal: Stavrogin meets Fed'ka along Bogoiavlenskaia Street on his way to and
from the Lebiadkins', meets Fed'ka in exactly the same spot where they had
previously parted. Like the rain and the darkness, Fed'ka's presence is
sustained in timelessness while Stavrogin engages in other business. When,
after each of the three visits, Stavrogin re-enters the darkness outside, he
also enters a world where nothing has changed. (Seckler 62)16
When Leo Tolstoy was a young
man serving in the Russian army during the Crimean War, he wrote his depiction
of military life in his Sevastopol Sketches (a trilogy, 1855). At the end of "Sevastopol in
May," he wrote a description of his life's hero, truth, which has been
mentioned by his biographers and critics as the best single synopsis of his
life's work:
The hero of my tale, [1] whom I love with all the powers of my soul, [2] whom I
have tried to depict in all of its beauty, [3] and who always [1] was, [2] is,
[3] and will be beautiful -- is truth. (116)17
This characterization of his
"hero" is dense with triplicity, as are many of Tolstoy's works. The
most obvious of these are the version of "The Three Bears" he wrote
in order to help in his project to educate his peasants and his didactic tale,
"The Three Old Men" (1886), meant to edify a society subject to a
church hierarchy he found distasteful. In this story, Tolstoy's Archbishop, a
passenger on a ship in the cold White Sea, encounters three old men whom he
hears described by three different sources as being "holy men." One
of these sources is referred to in three different ways ("little
muzhik," "peasant," and "fisherman"). The Archbishop
inconveniences the ship's company by demanding that he be taken to the island
where these old men live. There, he meets the simple old men and asks them how
they pray. They answer naïvely that they pray to God by saying: "Three are
Ye. Three are we. Have Ye mercy upon us." The Archbishop then spends all
day teaching the old men the Lord's Prayer, and leaves their remote island
satisfied that he has well carried out God's will. But soon a light on the
horizon appears, causing the Archbishop to ask the helmsman in triplistic
fashion what it might be "a boat, or not a boat; a bird, or not a bird; a
fish, or not a fish?" The light, in course, materializes as the three old
men, who have levitated themselves into the air and soared out over the sea in
pursuit of the ship so as to ask the Archbishop for further repetitions of his
instruction on how properly to pray. Thus Tolstoy's lesson to society about the
superfluity of the church hierarchy is rife with triplicity for mnemonic
effect. After his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901, he
is reputed to have synopsized his stance toward organized religion with a
rhyme, treating the triune relationship of himself, God, and the Russian
Orthodox Church in precisely nine (3x3) words: "Bog i ia -- my druz'ia /
Mne ne nuzhna religiia" ("God and I are friends / I don't need
religion"; see Croft, "Tolstoy's").
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere is a leading psychoanalytic interpreter of literature, often
including Freudian insights (e.g., the triplistic "id, ego, superego")
into his work. His recent work on Tolstoy, titled "Tolstoy on the
Couch," includes discussion of Tolstoy's "psychopathology" and
its effects on his literary works. The title (after a colon) continues, "
[1] Misogyny, [2] Masochism, and [3] the Absent Mother." In his review of
this work, Martin Bidney mentions Rancour-Laferriere's discussion of how the
narrator of Tolstoy's "never-finished 'Notes of a Madman'" witnesses
"three episodes of punishment," crying at two of them "and, in
the third, beats his head on the wall in identification with the tale of
Christ's crucifixion" (305). Consideration of this discussion leads to the
conclusion that triplistic aspects of Tolstoy's "psychopathology"
finds its reflection in the structure of his literary works and, perhaps
derivatively, in the works interpreting them. Again we see another triplicity:
the triplicity of Tolstoy's psychological neuroses, the triplicity of Tolstoy's
literary works, and the triplicity in Rancour-Laferriere's interpretation of
both -- hence the author, the work, the criticism: the main "stuff"
of our literary lives.
According to Temira Pachmuss, the symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius "saw various
manifestations of the number 'three' in the composition of the world -- the
Holy Trinity, the unity of human personality-love-society, or of the spiritual
world-man-material world, and so forth." Gippius explained that the
essence of her weltanschauung "can
be presented as an all-embracing triangle in the structure of the world and as
an uninterrupted merging of the three principles, indivisible and yet separate
from one another." Pachmuss has translated Gippius' poetic expression of
this idea from the poem, "Troinoe" ("Threefold," 1910).
The world abounds in a three-fold depth.
A threefold depth is given to poets.
And really don't poets speak
Only of this?
Only of this?
A threefold truth -- and a threefold beginning.
Poets trust in this truth.
God thinks only about this:
About Man.
Love.
And Death.
(Pachmuss 105)
Zinaida Gippius found commonality in the religio-philosophico-psychological work of
russophone (1) philosopher, (2) mystic, and (3) teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
(1866-1949) and his disciple Peter Demianovich Ouspensky (1878-1947), with their "Law
of Three," the "Three Paths to Awakening," and the derivative
nine-point "enneagram of personality types."18
John Garrard has elucidated the apocalyptic elements in Alexander Blok's innovative
narrative poem, Dvenadtsat' (The Twelve, 1918). He points out that
"the 'simple plot' of The Twelve [involves] the triangle of Petrukha, his prostitute girlfriend Katia,
who has abandoned him for a wealthier turncoat, Van'ka" (50). Garrard,
having studied Alexander Blok's personal copy of the Bible's book of
Revelation, elaborates that this "simple plot" "replicates in
miniature the narrative of Revelation in which John of Patmos predicts the fall
of Rome and Domitian by way of the coded imagery of the Whore of Babylon and
the Beast" (50). Garrard mentions Blok's consciousness that St. John, whom
he considered the author of three books of the Bible (The Gospel, the First
Epistle, and Revelation), three times uses the image of a bride preparing for
her wedding to describe aspects of the "three effects upon the world"
which will result from Christ's reappearance: "First, the exact moment
('hour') of his coming will be a surprise, no matter how urgently people have
been expecting and hoping for it. Second, his coming will cause massive change
and destruction. Third, he will be virtually unrecognizable at the hour of his
actual appearance" (58). Garrard continues that "Blok's most explicit
clue that the subtext for his Christ figure in Revelation lies in the three
iterations of the statement that the Twelve Red Guards follow a banner 'with no
cross.' The Twelve uses the same
line on three occasions quite early in the poem: 'Hey, Hey, with no
cross!'" (58). And, Blok made marginalia in the text of his copy of
Revelation, drawing lines to connect the jotted names of his characters to
characters in the text: for example, drawing a line between Revelation's
mention of the "Whore of Babylon" to the jotted name
"Katia," an important character in The Twelve. When St. John uses
the image of a wedding and a
bride three times, Blok "underlines precisely these [three] passages,"
and "as if the underlining and the parallel lines were not enough, he
added three X's in the margin" (Garrard 63-64).19
Edmund Wilson, the eminent literary critic, had a very high opinion of Nobel Prize
belated laureate Boris Pasternak's novel, Dr. Zhivago. In November of 1958, he wrote:
Dr. Zhivago will, I believe, come to
stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history. Nobody
could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world
who did not have the courage of genius. May his guardian angel be with him! His
book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit. As for his enemies
in his fatherland, I predict that their children, over their vodka and tea,
will be talking about the relations between Larisa Fyodorovna and Pasha and
Yury Andreevich [3] as their parents, and I don't doubt they themselves, have
talked about Tatyana and Lensky and Evgenii Onegin [3] and Natasha and Prince
Andrei and Pierre [3]. (Wilson, The Bit 446)20
Wilson discusses the
symbolism of the name "Zhivago," associating it with "life"
(the meaning of the Russian root "Zhiv-") in the life, death, and
resurrection triad. He compares the plot structure to an elaborate
"skazka" or "fairy tale" in which a "miraculous
figure" in the person of Zhivago's half-brother Evgraf three times comes
to Yury Zhivago's rescue:
first when, before Zhivago has taken his family away, he collapses in Moscow with
typhus; again, when he is marooned with his family in the Urals, before he has
been kidnapped by the partisans; and finally, when, returned to Moscow,
unwanted and unassimilable, he is on the point of petering out. On this last
occasion, Evgraf induces him to leave for a time his devoted lower-class wife
and provides him with lodgings in which to write. We never know what Evgraf is
or how he accomplishes his miracles; he is always an important person whose
authority is felt at once, never questioned; he can always produce food, secure
for his half-brother conditions of leisure. Yet we do not know [1] what office
he holds, [2] why he is always so sure of himself, and [3] how he has managed
to escape the purges. On his third intervention, he brings death in the flesh.
The Doctor, now hidden from his family, does not survive his last creative liberation,
but Evgraf preserves his manuscripts, the poems in which Yury lives again.
(Wilson, The Bit 442)21
>
One of the most emblematic stars of current Russian literature is Victor Olegovich Pelevin.
In her Russian Life article, "Victor
Pelevin: Genius Temporis," Galina Yuzefovich writes that: "You cannot
understand Russian literature of the past fifteen years without reading Victor
Pelevin" (40). And in the works of Pelevin, triplicity is often evident in
his relations of time, place, and character. In the tale "Zatvornik i
shestipalyi" ("Hermit and Six-toes," 1995), there are two main
characters and a "socium" of others -- all gradually revealed through
the flow of details to be chickens in a mechanized Russian food factory. As
these two, the "Hermit" and "Six-toes," consider their
place in their particular "cosmos," three lights are immediately
visible in the universe above them. The Hermit states that he has come to this
world from the third of five previous worlds where he has been. He and Six-toes
are then approached by a giant rat named One-eye. They ask the rat why "if
both eyes are in order he is called 'One-eye.'" The rat answers that the
"One-eye" refers to his third, inner, eye: an eye that is always
open. As their eventual fate becomes clear to them by the ninth (3x3) and last
chapter, Hermit and Six-toes escape from three of the "Gods" who
attempt to process them into food by pecking them and resorting to their
forgotten power of flight. Even the syllabic structure of the work is rife with
triplicity: the trisyllabic names (e.g., "Zatvornik," "Shesti
[2x3]-palyi," "Odnoglazyi" --these last two with adjectival
endings -- and the "Socium") and most powerful sentences: e.g.,
"Smert' prishla" ("Death arrived").
In all of Russian Culture, but especially in its preliterate narrative forms
through most of its most sophisticated modern literature, we find a pervasive
and intense triplicity -- in plot, characterization, and even the wording
itself; in source, theme, and method; in authors' lives, their relationships,
and their resultant treatment by scholars, critics, and literophiles. Telling
things three times in a triplistic way is a veritable hallmark of Russian
literature which opens diverse aspects of the culture as a whole to further
elucidation.
Notes
Many people have contributed to my study of the
"threes" in Russian literature and in literature and culture
generally. For their comments, suggested sources, sending of related articles,
letters, and other aid, some of it dating back to 1985, I would like to thank:
Pat Barrett, Chuck Winkler, Tatyana Dhaliwal, John Garrard, George Gutsche,
Tatiana Keeling, Jeanette Owen, Delbert Phillips, Rolfs Ekmanis, and Daniel
Rancour-Laferriere. I have also received inspiration from other sources,
including the internet's Threesology Research Journal
(<http://cenocracy.topcities.com> notably starting at page </cro1>
titled "Examples of Three: beginning"), an absolutely mind-boggling
analysis, apparently by triophile extraordinaire Herb O. Buckland, of
"pattern-of-threes" in our lives; the "Digital Project" of
Red Planet Software; and from Prof. John A. McNulty of Loyola University of
Chicago's School of Medicine for his amazing "List of Threes in
Anatomy" (cf.
<www.meddean.luc.edu/lumen/MedEd/GroassAnatomy/Threes.html>). A Russian
website by Alexander I. Stepanov titled "The Number and Culture. The
Rational Unconscious in Language, Fiction, Science, Present Politics,
Philosophy, History," including a good list of "Triple
Structures" is to be found at <www.alestep.narod.ru/eng_bl/>. An
interesting late find was Brian Stross' article, "Maya Bloodletting and
the Number Three," in which a "sonic resemblance" of
Mixe-Zoquean words for "three" and the Maya (and earlier Olmec) words
for ritual bloodletting is considered the etiology of homonymous iconographs.
1 Dr. Roy Hanu Hart, author of Bitter Grass, The Numbers of Heaven,
and Journey of Faith, responded this way (in a personal telephone conversation with
the author in 1999) when asked to comment on the genuineness of a television-interviewed
"Anastasia" pretender subsequently debunked by a DNA test (cf. Hart 198-200).
2 Nobel laureate Feynman uses this statement in the course of explaining what
he calls The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (84; italics mine).
3 Edmund Wilson uses Flaubert's
question "to Louise Colet" as the epigraph to his collection, The
Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects.
4 The key works here are those of
Roman O. Jakobson ("Beitrag" and "Morfologicheskie"),
wherein Jakobson describes the semantic structure of the Russian substantival
case system as a hierarchy of three semantic features binarily applied. His
description uses a two-dimensional graphic representation called a "Prague
School Markedness Diagram" (cf. the works of Catherine V. Chvany for
discussion of the model's adaptation into a three-dimensional figure, the
cube). In my "model of narrative efficiency" this diagram represents
the structure of the encoding capacity of the human mind. The decoding capacity
is described surprisingly analogously by George Miller who mathematically
defines limits on the information processing ability of the human mind within
diverse sensory parameters of short-term memory (through which narrative
communication flows) as a binary decision raised to the third power: i.e., 8,
or "Seven plus or minus two." Miller's description is well amenable
to graphic representation by a Praque School Markedness Diagram like
Jakobson's, forming a kind of iconicity between the encoding and the decoding
structures of the mind, an iconicity essential to successful communication and
narration.
5 These are categorizations from
several definitive grammars of the Russian language, including that of V.V.
Vinogradov. But this is not all. Linguists describe Slavic vocalic phonology on
a chart of two articulatory tricategorizations: front/central/back and
high/mid/low. They divide the consonants into stops, fricatives, and resonants
and the prosody into accent, pitch, and quantity/length (Carlton 80, 186).
6 The numbers in brackets, both here
and later are added to point out related triplicities.
7 This addresses, of course, the question of language/thought determinism
(advocating co-determinacy between the nominalist and relativist positions).
8 Only the 2nd edition Dutton
publication of Arndt's translation has this preface.
9 Another exemplification of criticism mirroring the triplicity of
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is that of Edmund Wilson, who
writes, "Pushkin has put into the relations between the three central
characters a number of implications ... they may be said to represent three
intellectual currents of the time: [1] Evgenii is Byronism turning worldly and
dry; [2] Lensky, with his Schiller and Kant, German Romantic idealism; [3]
Tatyana, that Rousseauist Nature which [1] was making itself heard in Romantic
poetry, [2] speaking a new language and [3] asserting a new kind of
rights" (The Triple Thnkers 44).
10 These are the only poems of this title included in the outstandingly
comprehensive and definitive Lermontovskaia Entsiklopediia (Manuilov
283-284). Translations are available in C.E. L'Ami and Alexander Welikotny, and
Anatoly Liberman. There is also a "Iunkerskaya molitva" ("A
Soldier's Prayer") in Lermontov's oeuvre, but this is not his prayer and the
title is not exactly the same.
11 A "troika" or "trio" in this sense is a Russian harness
arrangement, referring to a sleigh or carriage drawn by three animals. These quotations
are from the last page of Dead Souls, Part I, in any translation, but the wording
here is from Vladimir Nabokov's discussion in Nikolai Gogol (112-113).
12 I have preserved Zhekulin's transliteration of "Vii" as
"Viy" as part of a quotation of his article's title.
13 I have altered Richard Peace's translation slightly here, preferring
"Dog-keeper" (or even, as used elsewhere, "Dogboy") to render
the Russian "psar'" where Peace uses "Huntsman."
14 See Michael Katz' "A Brief Note on the Translation" in his
edition of Doestoevsky's Notes from the Underground (xi-xiv). I thank the RMMLA
reviewer for the three "zapiski" titles.
15 Certainly "three-shot pistols" are, and were, rare, though in a
market in Turkey in 2001, I found a replica of one manufactured in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries.
16 Dostoevsky-philes can often cite examples of triplicity in almost any work
of Dostoevsky's, but most frequently do they mention the triplicities of plot and
characterization in the novel Vechnyi muzh (Eternal Husband, 1870). I
am not trying to be exhaustive, only illustrative of the different main aspects
of the phenomenon.
17 The translation here is mine from Russian Through Poems and Songs (56).
18 The Gurdjieff/Ouspensky precepts obtained quite a following in Europe and the
United States after widespread translation of Ouspensky's Tertium Organum in 1912. See
P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way, and also
<www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/50bookexcerpts/ouspenskypioneer.htm> or
<www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/sgurd.html>.
19 Garrard also elaborates on the
Biblical use of the number twelve (61). Garrard's very insightful mention of
the symbolic glyphs here (the three X's) brings to mind the fact that Russian
uses three dots ("...") to mark ellipses. In that regard, Pushkin
titled his famous poem, "Ja pomniu chudnoe mgnovenie..." ("I
remember that wondrous instant...," 1825) as "K +++" using three
plus marks to signify the ellipsis of his muse's name. And, Lermontov
"titles" his poem (later song) "Vykhozhu odin ia na
dorogu..." ("Alone along the road I'm walking...," 1841) as
"***" (three asterisks, ostensibly to signal absence of a formal
title). The asterisk (Russian "zvezdochka" or "little
star") is perhaps the oldest and most universal glyph of all, dating to
the ideogram phase of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing: circa 3000 BCE (see
<http://std.dkuug.dk/jtcl/scz/wg2/docs/n2664.pdf>) and having in modern
computer typography both the original six-(2x3)-point and, because of the
Muslim perception that the six points symbolize an Israeli Star of David
(itself composed of two triangles), five-point versions. Three asterisks
arranged in a triangle are called an "asterism" (see
<http://en.widipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk>). Of course, the discussion here
involves Russian literary uses of three tripled glyphs (X, +, *) in addition to ordinary
punctuational "three dots."
20 The references in the quotation are to the triads of main characters in
(respectively) Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Tolstoy's
War and Peace: three immortal Russian works.
21 In this quotation we see described the life, death, and resurrection (by virtue
of his preserved poems) mentioned earlier.
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Lee B. Croft is Professor and Coordinator of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Arizona State
University, having taught there 32 years. He received a BS in Mathematics at Arizona State
University in 1968, an MA in Russian at the University of Arizona in 1970, and a PhD in
Slavic Linguistics from Cornell University in 1973. His specialties include the mnemonic
function of linguistic iconicity and the verse translation of Russian poetry.
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