During Gogol’s lifetime, and for many decades afterwards, no one would have thought that the 200th anniversary of his birth would be celebrated as a cultural event of global significance. In Russia, however, the writer was acclaimed literally from the time of his first book of prose: the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (published in two parts in 1831-32). Yet an understanding of the depth of his work did not come immediately; it required time and effort.
“Everyone was delighted by this lively description of a tribe that sang and did folk dances, by these fresh pictures of life in Little Russia, by this cheerfulness, at once simple-hearted and cunning,” wrote Alexander Pushkin about Evenings. Such was the general impression among writers and critics. The quality of the book that Pushkin described with the word “cunning” went almost unnoticed: the author of Evenings had skillfully lured his readers deep into his artistic world by revealing to them more and more new meanings, meanings that often directly contradicted one another.
Unrestrained, infectious joy… Yes, there is some of that in Evenings. But too, there is a tinge of sadness. Whence springs the sadness in the songs of the vivacious boys and girls in May Night, who apparently poured “their joy into sounds that were always inseparable from despondency”? Where does the minor-key ending of The Fair at Sorochintsy come from? (“It’s boring for the abandoned one! And the heart becomes heavy and sad…”) The lines prefigure the famous ending of The Tale of the Quarrel Between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforich: “It’s dull in this world, gentlemen!” Where in fact does the disturbed mood, portending misfortune, of the majority of the finales come from – like the ending of St. John’s Eve, when “the alarmed ravens… with wild cries raced around the skies”? In a word, the joy is deceptive; it is like a “beautiful and fickle guest” (from The Fair at Sorochintsy) who is ready to abandon us at any minute.
The main features of Evenings are a striving for abstraction, the difficulty of resolving the relationship between good and evil, and the artless “cunning” of the story-telling, which forces the reader to reject first impressions in favor of other, more profound conclusions. Gogol developed all of these features in subsequent works, including those that found their way into the collections Mirgorod and Arabesques (both published in 1835).
The first tale in Mirgorod is Old World Landowners: an endless description of food with incredibly detailed descriptions of the dishes (one of the two landowners, Afanasy Ivanovich, is reckoned to eat nine times a day), and references to the empty conversations and stupid jokes and all the instances when Afanasy Ivanovich is making fun of his wife, Pulkheria Ivanovna. In a word, it would seem to be merely a diary of a feckless, passionless, miserable life. But when Pulkheria Ivanovna dies, Afanasy Ivanovich is discovered to have such a depth of inconsolable grief as could overshadow any romantic passion. Gogol’s ability to make art discover unexpected aspects of a phenomenon was described by Belinsky: “Take his Old World Landowners: What is there to them?… You see all of the trivialities and meanness of this life – a bestial, hideous, caricature of a life – while at the same time you become involved with the characters of the tale, you laugh at them, but not with malice, and then weep with Philemon over his Baucis… Oh, Mr Gogol is a veritable sorcerer…”
One of Gogol’s greatest displays of his sorcerer’s art is the tale The Nose (1836). What can we actually draw from the story of how Major Kovalev’s nose disappeared one day from his face, and later happily returned to its rightful place? The storyteller himself seems to be at a loss: “How authors can take on such subjects…”
But there is so much of the “unexpected” in this joke, to use Pushkin’s words! Above all, there is the amazingly subtle interweaving of the fantastical and the real. The events are obviously absurd, ridiculous – yet the manner in which they are described is resolutely specific, at times formal and business-like, with dates and places where the action takes place precisely designated (“On March 25 an unusual and strange incident happened in Petersburg,” and so on); the author says he “does not know” what he is talking about in order not to invent things (the surname of the barber Ivan Yakovlevich is not disclosed, as it has been “lost” on the sign outside the shop…).
The behavior of the person to whom the misfortune happens stands in intrinsic contrast: Major Kovalev, thunder-struck by the “strange incident,” nevertheless behaves as though what has happened is, though unusual, entirely real: straight off he “flew to the Chief of Police” as though he’d been robbed; he does not know how to start a conversation with his own nose, since the nose, as a State Counselor, is now of higher rank, etc. Of course, the sketch of Kovalev, as of other characters, is noticeably grained with satire, but this does not amount to an accusation against the tale; rather we should assume that any reader can easily enter the position of the hero, who cries out in a fit of rage: “My God! What have I done to deserve such misfortune? If I were without an arm or a leg, it would be better; being without an ear would be bad, but still bearable; but without a nose a person is the Devil only knows what – a bird or not a bird, a citizen or not a citizen; just take it and throw it out of the window!” The “joke,” executed in Gogol’s inimitable comic style, also contains some of that meaning expressed in another of Pushkin’s phrases: “the heavens mocking the Earth.”
At the root of any of Gogol’s tales is some crisis event, often complicated by a loss or bereavement, sometimes by the hidden opposition of different characters, and sometimes by the inference of obscure and mysterious forces. In The Overcoat (1842), the last of the St. Petersburg tales, all three factors act together: The fatal shift in the fate of a poor St. Petersburg clerk is connected to his acquiring and then losing an overcoat; moreover, the people around him make their contribution, with their indifference and cold-heartedness, as does “nature” herself – as Sergei Eisenstein said – whose elements, in apparent collusion, rise up against the “creature hunted and oppressed” by everyone. Once again we are plunging uncontrollably into the depths of Gogol’s artistic world…
The expatriate Russian author Rostislav Pletnev wrote: “Many scholars and artists… have written about The Overcoat, and have been unable to exhaust the topic. In it, the life of something immeasurably touching – comic and grotesque, unfinished, standing up and disappearing – lives and moves in a special space, not three-dimensional but fantastical… I do not think that there is even a single tale like The Overcoat in Russian or Western literature. In it is the witchcraft of Hoffman, the horror of Edgar Allan Poe, the realism and fantasy of Balzac, the humor of Dickens and Thackeray, a struggle with banality and with the harshness of life, and something awfully sad, doomed to wretchedness.” Other names also suggest themselves: for example, Franz Kafka, whose Metamorphosis continues the traditions of Gogol’s The Nose, or the Portuguese writer and Nobel laureate Jose Samargo, who has spoken of the influence that Gogol’s art had on him.
The artistic world of Gogol’s most significant dramatic work – the comedy The Government Inspector (1836) – is profound and inexhaustible. Consider, for example, the misunderstanding, the substitution, the quid pro quo that underlies the play, when Khlestakov is mistaken for a government inspector. In the place of this character could have been a genuinely important official concealing his true purpose for a time in order to punish vice at the end (e.g. Pravdin in Fonvizin’s The Minor). It could have been a notorious scoundrel passing himself off as an important person (Pustolobov in the comedy by Gogol’s contemporary G.F. Kvitki-Osnovyanenko: The Arrival from the Capital, or Turmoil in the District Town). Or it could have been someone there completely by chance, a person erroneously taken for an inspectorate official but who did not plan to take advantage of and did not take advantage of the situation (a similar story happened with Pushkin, who was once taken for a government inspector in Nizhny Novgorod).
Yet Khlestakov’s case is a special one: he did not intend to deceive anyone, did not construct any far-reaching plans or carry out premeditated machinations – in fact he barely understood everything that was going on – but nevertheless played the role of an “empowered personage” with success. He brought not only several officials but the whole “town” to the edge of a crisis; he sucked everyone into an atmosphere of tense expectation – reprisals, punishments, rewards and finally the restoration of justice; he created an atmosphere of fear and anxiously excited agitation, without having either the authority to do so or even any psychological qualities. Khlestakov, in Gogol’s words, was “deceitful, a lie incarnate,” and the action that unfolds with his unwitting participation takes on a mirage-like, grotesque glow.
We can also see this glow in the poem Dead Souls, a work to which Gogol dedicated almost 17 years (the first volume came out in 1842, while the second was destroyed by its author not long before his death; only fragments of a rough edition have survived).
The very first intention – “to show all of Rus’ at least from one side” – displays the purely Gogolian complexity of the task. “From one side” means the side of shortcomings, of vices, of “injustices.” But it is not just limited to satire; au contraire – as in The Government Inspector, in fact as in all of Gogol’s other works – satire is only one of the shades on Gogol’s multicolored and brilliant palette. This can be seen, for example, in the development in the central theme of the poem – that of deathliness, and the “dead soul.”
The expression “dead soul” has an entirely concrete meaning, yet one still fraught with contradictions; it signifies a serf who has died but who is still counted on official lists (so-called “enumeration lists”) and who therefore enjoys a shadowy existence. On this inconsistency are built up layers of other meanings: Deathliness as a specific psychological state, immersion exclusively in the sphere of material and mercenary cares; deathliness as alienation from common interests; deathliness as a complex and disfigured system of human relationships. In concentrated form, the whole of this web of meanings is expressed in Gogol’s notes to the poem: “The idea of the town. Emptiness risen to the highest degree. Idle talk. Gossips who have crossed the limits, as all of this arose from idleness and took on the expression of the highest form of ridiculousness.”
At the same time, the particularly Russian scope of the panorama also broadened: the original concentration on the negative, the “low” and the comic (Rus’ “from one side”) ought to have given way to something rounded, drawing into the action other more significant characters, including a “husband endowed with divine valor” and a “miraculous Russian girl who can’t be found anywhere in the world”; in a word, all of the “immeasurable wealth of the Russian soul.” This is all promised in the first book, but was meant to take place throughout the poem, which caused enormous difficulties for Gogol and came at great cost to his strength and nerves.
Experiencing problems while writing the second volume of Dead Souls, Gogol conceived a different, unusual book: Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (published in 1847).
This was written mainly not in the language of images, but in the language of polemic, moral precepts and sermons. “The duty of the writer,” Gogol asserted, “is not only to deliver a pleasant engagement to his mind and tastes; he will be harshly called to account if… he leaves nothing that instructs people.” His previous works now appeared to Gogol to be lacking, since they did not teach people virtue and did not teach them effective lessons. Now he formulated his “lessons” distinctly and clearly – and in an authoritative mood: “You must love Russia”, “you have to travel across Russia…”
The book’s strong points are its assertion of thoughts about the necessity to transfigure everyone in the spirit of humaneness and the Christian worldview and behavior. At the same time, Gogol was moving toward a problem that at the time was of acute importance for Russia – the need for social reform and the abolition of serfdom. But this does not mean that he had reconciled himself with the existing order of things. Labeling his previous works “thoughtless and immature,” the author of Selected Passages in reality continued their main theme – “the banality of the banal man.” “Everything is becoming petty and shallow, and the only thing that grows in front of everyone is the gigantic image of boredom, which every day achieves the most immeasurable growth. Everything is indifferent; the grave is all around. God! It is becoming empty and fearful in your world!” Let’s remind ourselves of the significant phrases from Gogol’s early works:
“It was boring for one left out! And the heart became heavy and sad…”
“It is dull in this world, gentlemen!”
Regardless of its obvious certainty, directness and categorical nature, Selected Passages is also, it turns out, not as simple and unambiguous as it may have appeared to some contemporaries.
Gogol’s immense significance for Russian literature became apparent only gradually, over a long period of time, and this is entirely in keeping with the writer’s endlessly complex nature. For his immediate followers, representatives of the so-called “natural school,” of greatest significance were ideas of social criticism and the utmost attention to the darker sides of life – as Gogol put it, his “petty troubles in prose” – and finally the humanistic treatment of the theme of the “little man.” The grotesque and fantastical origins of Gogol’s poetics remained in the shadows.
Then, in 1861, Dostoevsky wrote about “Gogol’s laughing mask,” “with the formidable power of laughter – with a power that has never been expressed so strongly, nowhere and in no literature since the world was created.” Later, at the turn of the century, more attention began to be paid to the philosophical and religious nature of Gogol’s artistic thought, to his moral problematics; at the time, the Russian writer was gradually becoming an instrumental factor in world literature.
This process can be clearly seen in one example – attitudes to Dead Souls. The well-known Gogol researcher Nikolai Korobka has written that this “glorious picture that recalls the brush of Michelangelo in the force of its imagery,” nevertheless “has little of general human significance and is probably not able to affect a European.” The words of one such “European,” the French writer Melchior de Vogüé, sound as an unintended answer to Korobka: “Our Mérimée compared Gogol with the English humorists; but he should be set higher, not far from the immortal Cervantes… Like Cervantes, Gogol invested in his purely national pictures such a broad and such a deep knowledge of man that these local images make the heart beat everywhere where there are people.”
To conclude, one more phrase, this one belonging to the émigré Russian author Georgy Adamovich, who in his foreword to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Luzhin Defense wrote: “It is from Gogol that Nabokov gets his pedigree. Gogol’s double vision, the fantastical nature and the illusory quality of Gogol’s deceptively everyday pictures appear to Nabokov – and not to him alone – to be the principal features of Dead Souls and even of The Overcoat. And this feature, after a century of a different, more resilient, calm, fleshly realism, miraculously coincided with that feeling for or interpretation of life that colors many new Western narratives about people and their fates.” To this we can make only one addition – not only “Western narratives”; let us think of Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Daniil Kharms, Yury Olesha, Venedikt Yerofeev, Andrei Bitov and other Russian writers. RL
“[Gogol] is always either elaborately rhythmical or quite as elaborately mimetic. It is not only in his dialogue that the intonations of spoken speech are reproduced. His prose is never empty. It is all alive with the vibrations of spoken speech. This makes it hopelessly untranslatable – more untranslatable than any other Russian prose.”
– mitry S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature
DEAD NAME: “Even Gogol’s name was fictitious, a sort of natural pseudonym. The family name was Yanovsky, but when Catherine the Great decreed that only hereditary gentry could own serfs, Gogol’s Ukrainian grandfather invented a noble ancestor, Hohol (in Russian, Gogol) and changed his name to Gogol-Yanovsky, which was Gogol’s name until he dropped the real part.” (Gary Saul Morson)
PUSHKIN: “There is a legend, it seems of Gogol’s making, that when, not long before Pushkin’s death, Gogol read to him the first draft of the first chapter of Dead Souls, Pushkin exclaimed, ‘God, how sad Russia is!’”
– Vladimir Nabokov
DUELING MONUMENTS: The first Moscow monument to Gogol (see photo, page 42) was unveiled on Nikitsky bulvar in 1909. It was considered controversial and Stalin hated it, ordering it destroyed in 1952, and a new, Stalinesque monument was erected in its place. The original was, however, saved at Donskoy Monastery for 15 years, whence it was moved back to the courtyard in front of the house where Gogol died a century before.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
