Russian Love of Nature

The Puzzle

On this season of Pints With Jack, we’ve been reading through The Four Loves. In section on patriotism, Lewis says:

For some people, perhaps especially for Englishmen and Russians, what we call “the love of nature” is a permanent and serious sentiment.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

I mentioned in the episode that, given the amount of ink spilt in praise of nature in prose and poetry, I could understand his comment about the English. However, while my exposure to Russian literature was more limited, I couldn’t recall noticing the same fascination. 

Paging Dr. Downing…

Given his knowledge of literature and Lewis’ personal library, I reached out to Dr. David Downing at the Wade Center, asking if he could shed any light on this.

He replied that the main Russian writer Lewis knew and admired was Leo Tolstoy. Here is what he wrote about War and Peace in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves:

The most interesting thing that has happened to me since I last wrote is reading War and Peace—at least I am now in the middle of the 4^th and last volume so I think, bar accidents, I am pretty sure to finish it. It has completely changed my view of novels.

Hitherto I had always looked on them as rather a dangerous form— I mean dangerous to the health of literature as a whole. I thought that the strong “narrative lust”—the passionate itch to “see what happened in the end”—which novels aroused, necessarily injured the taste for other, better, but less irresistible, forms of literary pleasure: and that the growth of novel reading largely explained the deplorable division of readers into low-brow and high-brow—the low being simply those who had learned to expect from books this “narrative lust,” from the time they began to read, and who had thus destroyed in advance their possible taste for better things. I also thought that the intense desire which novels rouse in us for “happiness” of the chief characters (no one feels that way about Hamlet or Othello) and the selfishness with which this happiness is concerned, were thoroughly bad….

Tolstoy, in this book, has changed all that. I have felt everywhere—in a sense—you will know what I mean—that sublime indifference to the life or death, success or failure, of the chief characters, which is not a blank indifference at all, but almost like submission to the will of God. Then the variety of it. The war parts are just the best descriptions of war ever written: all the modern war books are milk and water to this: then the rural parts—lovely pictures of village life and of religious festivals in which the relations between the peasants and the nobles almost make you forgive feudalism: the society parts, in which I was astonished to find so much humor—

C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (29th March 1931)

He pointed out that, in the last last paragraph, Lewis expresses his admiration for Tolstoy’s depictions of rural life and its closeness to nature.

Also, while he doubted whether Lewis read them, Dr. Downing mentioned that one also sees the Russian love of nature in Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, as well as in the poetry of Pushkin.

Thanks Dr. Downing!