April 1st 1809: Born in the bright and muddy market town of Sorochintzy (stress accent on “chintz”), Province of Poltava, Little Russia (see page 7).
1821: Matriculated (Nezhin High School) (page 8).
1825: His father, a small landowner and an amateur Ukrainian playwright, died.
1828: Graduated and went to St. Petersburg. The distance is from 50° to 60°, i.e. the same as from Vancouver to Caribou. That year Tolstoy was born in the Province of Tula.
1829: Desultory job-hunting and publication of two poems, the lyric Italy and what he dubbed “an idyll,” the long and indifferent Hanz Kuechelgarten (page 9).
August 1st 1829: Burnt all the copies of Hanz (page 10).
August–Sept. 1829: Freak journey to Northern Germany (page 23). Flitted back and entered the Civil Service (page 26).
1830: Began contributing short stories of Ukrainian life to literary reviews (page 26).
1831: Flitted out of the cob-webbed gloom of Civil Service and began teaching history at a young ladies’ institute. The girls found him dull.
End of May 1831: Met Pushkin. (Alexander Pushkin, 1799–1837, the greatest Russian poet) (page 29).
September 1831: Published first volume of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, a collection of short stories dealing with ghosts and Ukrainians, and still considered by some critics to be very racy and full of fun (page 29).
March 1832: Second volume of the above. There is a famous description of the Dniepr in the story The Awful Vengeance (“Fair is the Dniepr in windless weather, etc.”) and a touch of the real Gogol to come, in Ivan Shponka and his Aunt (page 32).
1834: Was appointed through literary friends to the post of Assistant Professor of World History at the University of St. Petersburg. His first lecture, which he had carefully prepared, successfully concealed his meager erudition under the rotund waves of his poetical eloquence. Subsequently he used to appear with his cheek bandaged up so as to imply a swollen jaw hampering speech and dejectedly dealt out and distributed among his students little pictures of Roman ruins.
1835: Published two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, containing: Viy, a gooseflesh story, not particularly effective; The Old-World Landowners, where “the vegetable humors of the old pair, their sloth, their gluttony, their selfishness, are idealized and sentimentalized” (Mirsky: History of Russian Literature, page 194); the Story of the Quarrel between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich which he had read to Pushkin on December 2nd 1833 (“very original and very funny”—Pushkin’s comment) and which is the best of his purely humorous tales; and Taras Bulba, a melodramatic account of the adventures of quite fictitious cossacks—something like the Cid of Corneille and his Spaniards (or Hemingway’s Spaniards, for that matter) in a Ukrainian disguise. The same year he published a volume of essays and stories, Arabesques, among which are the Nevsky Avenue (page 12), the Memoirs of a Madman (see concluding passage: page vi) and The Portrait—a portrait coming to life—that kind of thing. About the same time he wrote his remarkable nightmare The Nose, the story of an unfortunate person, whose nose went off on its own in the aspect of a man about town (as in dreams when you know that somebody is so-and-so, but are not disturbed by his looking like somebody else or like nothing at all) (page 4) and two plays: Revizor (The Government Inspector) (page 35), and Getting Married—a rather slipshod comedy about the hesitations of a man who has made up his mind to marry, has a swallowtail coat made, is provided with a fiancée—but at the last moment makes a fenestral exit. None of Gogol’s heroes could get very far with women.
December 18th 1835: “We spat at each other and parted, I and the University. I am again a carefree cossack.” (from a letter to Pogodin).
January 30th 1836: Read his new play The Government Inspector at one of Zhoukovsky’s soirées. (Zhoukovsky, 1783–1878, leader of the “romantic movement,” the great translator of German and English poetry).
May 1st 1836: First performance of The Government Inspector (page 37).
June 1836: Left in a huff for foreign lands (page 57). “Henceforward for twelve years (1836–48) he lived abroad, coming to Russia for short periods only.” (Mirsky: page 186).
October 1836: Vevey, Switzerland. Here he really began writing the First Part of Dead Souls, which had been planned out some time in May in St. Petersburg.
Winter 1836–1837: Paris. Lived on the corner of the Place de la Bourse and rue Vivienne. Wrote there a large portion of the First Part of Dead Souls. Browning’s door is preserved in the library of Wellesley College. On warmish days he took Chichikov for strolls in the Tuileries. Sparrows, grey statues.
Beginning of 1837: Rome. “My life, my supreme delectation has died with him.” (letter to Pogodin after Pushkin’s duel and death in St. Petersburg).
Spring 1838: Rome. Two Polish Catholics thought—judging by their reports to headquarters—that they were very successfully converting Gogol. The critic Veressaiev (Gogol v. Zhisni, Moscow-Leningrad, 1933. Academia: page 190) suggests however that Gogol was rather nastily deceiving the good men whom he dropped as soon as his rich and useful friend Princess Zinaida Volkonsky (an ardent Catholic) had left Rome.
May 1839: A brief romantic friendship with young Prince Vielgorsky who was dying of tuberculosis in Rome. The hours spent at the young man’s bedside have their vibrant echo in the pathos of Gogol’s short piece Nights in a Villa.
Winter 1839–1840: Return to Russia. Read the first chapters of Dead Souls to his literary friends.
April 1840: “A person not having his own carriage would like to find a traveling companion having one for a journey to Vienna. Expenses shared.” (Advertisement in Moscow Gazette).
June 1840–October 1841: Back in Italy. Was much together with Russian painters who worked in Rome. Completed The Overcoat (page 139).
Winter 1841–1842: Back in Russia.
1842: Published First Part of Dead Souls (page 61). In Gogol’s day you could, if you were a Russian landowner, sell peasants, buy peasants and mortgage peasants. Peasants were termed “souls” as cattle is reckoned by “heads.” If you then happened to mention that you had a hundred souls, you would mean not that you were a minor poet, but that you were a small squire. The Government checked the number of your peasants, as you had to pay a poll tax for them. If any of your peasants died you would still have to go on paying until the next census. The dead soul was still on the list. You could no longer use the mobile physical appendages it had had once, such as arms or legs, but the soul you had lost was still alive in the Elysium of official paperdom and only another census could obliterate it. The immortality of the soul lasted for a few seasons, but you had to pay for it all the time. Chichikov’s plan in Dead Souls was to acquire those unavoidably accumulating dead souls from you, so that he, not you, would be paying the tax. He thought you would be glad to get rid of them and overjoyed if you got a small bonus from him for the transaction. After he had collected a sufficient number of these ridiculously cheap souls, he intended to mortgage them, as good live souls, which they nominally were according to official documents. As I suggest (page 72) a Government which allowed the traffic of live souls, that is live human beings, could be hardly expected to act as an ethical expert in a business involving merely the traffic of dead souls—abstract nicknames on a scrap of paper. This point Gogol completely missed when in the second part of Dead Souls he attempted to treat Chichikov as a human sinner and the Government as a superhuman judge. All the characters in the first part being equally subhuman, and all living in the bosom of Gogol’s demonocracy, it does not matter a damn who judges whom.
Chichikov is shown coming to the town of N. and making friends with its worthies. He then visits the neighboring squires and more or less cheaply gets his dead souls from them. The sequence of his deals takes him to solemn, thick-backed Sobakevich; to mild lackadaisical Manilov; to covetous, moth-eaten Plushkin, pronounced “plew-shkin,” as if the moth had made a hole in the plush; to Dame Korobochka, who is a perfect mixture of the superstitious and the matter-of-fact; and to the bully Nozdryov, who is a nasty noisy nosey swindler and not a pleasant one as Paul Chichikov is. The former’s chatter and Korobochka’s wariness turn the town against our plump adventurer, our necrophilous Casanova, our rolling stone, our Mr. Chichikov. He leaves the town on the wings of one of those wonderful lyrical interpolations, which the author inserts (landscape, expanded metaphor, conjuror’s patter) every time his hero is on his way between two business interviews. For discussion of the texture of Dead Souls see pages 61–113.
Of the Second Part of the novel we have only the first chapters. A few more squires are interviewed and finally Chichikov gets into some real trouble with the police. Good as some passages are, the author’s spiritual message is felt to be gradually killing the book (page 132).
1842–1848: Travels from place to place seeking health, inspiration, finding neither.
1847: Published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (page 126).
Spring 1848: Dim pilgrimage to Palestine (page 130).
1848–1852: Moscow, Odessa, Vassilievka (his mother’s home), monasteries, Moscow again.
February 1852: “Renounce Pushkin! He was a sinner and a pagan,” said fierce, healthy Father Matthew to limp, sick Gogol during their last meeting.
February 11th 1852: “That night Gogol prayed for a long time alone in his room. At 3 a.m. he called his servant boy and wanted to know whether the rooms on the other side of the house were warm [he was staying in the Moscow house of Count A. P. Tolstoy, a fanatic follower of Father M.] The boy answered they were not. ‘Give me a cloak,’ said Gogol, ‘and come on, I have some business there.’ He went, carrying a candle, and making the sign of a cross in every room he passed through. In one of them he ordered the boy to open the flue as softly as possible so as not to awaken anybody and then asked for a certain portfolio that lay in a chest-of-drawers. When the portfolio was brought he took out a batch of copybooks tied together with a ribbon, put them into the stove and set fire to the papers by means of his candle. The boy [so Pogodin tells us in his account of the burning of the Second and Third Parts of Dead Souls] understanding what was happening, fell on his knees and implored him to desist. ‘None of your business,’ said Gogol, ‘better pray.’ The boy began to sob and continued to plead with him. Gogol noticed that the fire was going out—that only the corners of the copybooks had been charred. So he took out the bundle, undid the ribbon, placed the papers in such a way as to facilitate combustion, tipped his candle again and then sat down on a chair beside the fire, waiting for the papers to be consumed. When it was all over, he crossed himself, went back to his room, kissed the boy, lay down on a couch and broke into tears.” A feeling of relief may have been mingled with the sense of disaster (page 131).
March 4th 1852: Died (page 1).