The Dark Laughter of Nikolay Gogol
Russia! Oh Russia! From an enchanted far-off haven I see you now… Boundless as you are, are you not the land destined to bring forth geniuses boundless as yourself? Are you not the land fated to breed heroes, you who can offer them scope and terrain in which to realize their powers?… Oh Russia! land of glittering and sublime horizons, of which the world is utterly ignorant!…
—Gogol, Dead Souls
Strange are the anomalies that at times occur in what appears to be a predictable universe. Such, for example, as happened when Tsar Nicholas I of Russia extended his imperial permission for the production and performance of a comedy, The Inspector General, composed by Nikolay Gogol. The play opened at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on May 1, 1836, in the presence of the Tsar and his august entourage.
Certainly, we may guess that scarcely one person in the audience could have suspected he was present at a major theatrical event—that the play before him was not only to inaugurate a new era in the Russian theatre, but would also stir up passions and controversy for years to come. In extending his permission, the present Tsar was acting more kindly than his father, Alexander I. The latter’s censors had been keeping a strict eye on the theatre, wary of anything that might smack of pointed satire or criticism of the authorities—even the slightest. Thus the dramatist Aleksandr Griboedov, the most brilliant playwright of that era, had been subjected to irreparable harassment, and his most notable comedy, Wit Works Woe—a mild, if provocative, satire of contemporary gentry society—was banned from production during the author’s lifetime.
But here, before an audience including the highest of the land, Gogol was presenting a side of Russian life scarcely anyone had dared exhibit before. The audience was stunned, baffled, intrigued, amused, or outraged—and it would take years before they would fully assimilate the import of The Inspector General.
The plot of the comedy is simple. The mayor of a provincial Russian town, also in fact a kind of prefect of the police, is informed through a friend’s letter that an Inspector General is about to arrive incognito with a view to investigating conditions. Appalled at the prospect, he calls a meeting of the other officials to consider a suitable “strategy.” The district judge, the welfare commissioner, the superintendent of schools, the postmaster, the hospital’s German doctor—all arrive and begin to share in the general consternation. For it appears at once that there is something “rotten” in the way the town has been run.
A lightning-like series of exchanges soon throws a glaring beam on the several derelictions of these officials, ranging from peccadilloes like the postmaster’s irrepressible relish in reading the mail entrusted to him, to the welfare commissioner’s super-efficient management of the hospital, where patients are cured in “Nature’s way”—that is, those who are destined to die, die; those destined to live, live; patients are cured like “flies,” and the doctor does not even speak Russian. But the master craftsman of malfeasance is the Mayor himself, an amalgam of brutality, greed, arrogance, and genius for extortion, not averse to administering a flogging or two when necessity commands.
Soon two potbellied town gossips rush in—Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky—breathless with the news that there is a young man staying at the inn who does not pay his bills and refuses to go away. Surely this is —. Appalled, the Mayor sets off for the inn to pay the stranger a visit….
In fact, there is a young man staying at the inn. His name is Khlestakov, and he is a very ordinary young man, a petty government clerk, more interested in gambling than in his official duties or advancement, but extremely adroit in spending his father’s money. He has lost heavily at cards, and is now on his way back to the family estate. Penniless, he has been staying at the inn, living on credit reluctantly granted him by the landlord, and is now in fear of immediate arrest. He is accompanied by his servant Ossip, whose homely comments about his master serve to round out the unflattering picture of the ne’er-do-well.
The Mayor of course figures that this must be the Government Inspector in disguise. A terrified Mayor confronts an equally terrified Khlestakov. What a surprise for both: The Mayor invites Khlestakov to stay in his house. Khlestakov accepts, and from that moment on, his fortunes change. Having become a person of grand importance, he soon begins to take advantage of his mistaken identity. He makes “loans” from the attending officials; he extracts sums from toadying merchants come to lodge complaints against the Mayor. He captures the hearts of both the Mayor’s wife and his daughter, proposes to the latter, and fills the Mayor’s heart with pride, joy, and expectations.
Had Khlestakov only hearkened to the advice of wise Ossip, his servant, all would have been well. But the foolish young man, instead of skipping, as Ossip advises, confides his successes in a letter to a friend in Petersburg; which letter, as we may rightly surmise, is inspected by the Postmaster, and its contents revealed to the entire covey of town scoundrels. Khlestakov escapes, but in the midst of all this, lightning strikes the panic-stricken coterie: a gendarme appears, announcing the arrival of the real Inspector General and summoning all of them to the inn…
If, at first glance, the theme of the play might seem commonplace—a case of mistaken identity, and local skulduggery—the brilliance with which Gogol manipulates the action, the rapidity of incident, and the wit he manifests through the individual characters are truly amazing. But seen additionally in the context of the time and the place, the play grows in a double stature. The brush-strokes are rapid, few, and telling.
The interplay among the several rascals confronted by an unavoidable catastrophe has all the freshness of high comedy and sharp satire.
Take for example the scene in which they begin accusing one another. The district judge confesses to a “sin”—he has been taking wolfhound puppies as “gifts.” The Mayor (himself no mean sinner) berates him:
The Mayor: Wolfhounds, or anything else. They’re bribes all the same, aren’t they?
District Judge: Oh, no, Anton Antonovich. If a man takes, for example, a fur coat worth 500 rubles and a shawl for his wife—
Mayor: OK! OK!—So you take only wolfhounds… But… You don’t believe in God, and you never go to church. Now I—I’m religious, I go to church every Sunday. But you—I know you. When you begin to talk of the creation of the world, it makes one’s hair stand on end…
Well—it takes a thief to catch a thief… But the thieves also have their sense of status, as exhibited when the Mayor castigates one of his menial subordinates:
See here. You’d better look out. I know your sort! You work hand in glove with all kind of people… You slip silver spoons into your boots… Look out. I’ve got sharp ears. What did you grab from the merchant Chernayev the other day? He gave you two yards of cloth for your uniform, and you pinched the whole piece. Take care! I warn you! For this sort of thing—remember you’re still small potatoes. You grab more than someone in your station is entitled to. And now, get going!…
And now, this shrewd Mayor—so conscious of his rank and, of course, his shrewdness, who has outwitted half the town, skinned the merchants and helped the merchants cheat the government—has allowed himself to be duped by a nondescript ninny like Khlestakov! Before the final bombshell falls and the arrival of the true Inspector General is announced, he castigates himself:
And I am—oh what an idiot! I deserve every bit of it! What an ass I’ve shown myself! Thirty years in the service, and not one dog of a merchant of building contracts had had the better of me. I’ve outwitted every rogue in creation. I’ve taken the measure of cheats and scoundrels who could fleece the whole world. I’ve hoodwinked three governors. But what are governors, after all!
And he turns to the audience:
Come, come, all you good Christians, take a good look at me. See what an ass I’ve turned out to be. A petty windbag like that, a shred of rags, and I mistook him for a person of consequence! Now he will spread the story all over the world, and some scribbler will come along and put me into a comedy, and the whole world will grin and clap… What are you laughing at? Why, you’re laughing at yourselves!…
De te fabula, dear audience!
The young wastrel, Khlestakov, also undergoes a preternatural inflation of his ego as a result of his vast and easy successes at extortion. Caught up in his own fabrication, he magnetizes his astounded audience of lickspittles and misled admirers:
Perhaps you imagine I’m nothing but a copying clerk. Not by a long shot! I’m on the most intimate footing with my section head… I spend only a minute or two in the office, just enough to say, “Do this” or “Do that”… I’m acquainted with pretty actresses… and I’m on friendly terms with Pushkin. When we meet, I say, “Hello Pushkin my boy, how goes it?” “So—so, my friend, thanks… So—so…” He’s a quiet character, that Pushkin… I’m the author of lots and lots of works—The Marriage of Figaro, Robert le Diable, Norma. Bless me if I can remember all the titles… On my table, for example, there is a watermelon that cost seven hundred rubles. The soup I serve is brought in a casserole by steamer straight from Paris. You raise the lid and Heavens! what an aroma— there’s nothing like it in the world! As for my whist parties—the Foreign Minister, the French ambassador, the German ambassador—and me!… Then I rush home and climb to the fourth floor, and can barely say to my cook, “Mavrush, take my overcoat”—but what am I saying?—I forgot I live on the first floor. In the morning you’d be surprised what my waiting-room looks like—counts and princes… humming like a swarm of bumblebees—bz… bz… bz… (The Mayor and the other are overcome with awe, and rise from their seats.)
According to one report, the Tsar laughed and laughed, and said, “Everyone has caught it, but I’ve caught it more than anyone else.” He must have been particularly struck by the final tableau—the “frozen petrification”—demanded in the stage directions, in which the actors were required to remain glued for a minute or two in their places, and in characteristic poses, absolutely motionless and dumb—until the fall of the curtain. Was this meant to be a picture of petrification—of a petrified society, come to be judged? The Tsar did not draw such conclusion, but others did…
The Tsar laughed, so did the Tsarina, the heir to the throne, and various duchesses and grand duchesses. The Tsar, it is reported, ordered his ministers to see the play. This from Aleksandr Nikitenko, among the more liberal of the government’s censors, who records in his diary for April 28, 1836 (Old Style):
Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General has created quite a sensation. It is performed continuously almost every other day… I saw the third performance… In front of me, in the stalls, sat Prince Chernyshev and Count Kankrin. The former expressed his utter delight; the latter said only: “Was it worth going to see such a stupid farce?” Many people feel that the government should not approve a play in which it is so harshly censured. I saw Gogol yesterday. He wears the expression of a great man tormented by a wounded pride. Gogol, however, has really performed a great service. The impression produced by his comedy adds substantially to what we are coming to realize about the existing order of things in our country.1
Thus, two divergent camps faced each other in opposition. The old diehards saw in The Inspector General a libel on the Russian people. On the other side, Pushkin, Prince Viazemsky in The Contemporary, and somewhat later the critic Vissarion Belinsky, defended the play vigorously. Belinsky hailed Gogol as the “poet of reality.”
But Gogol himself was unhappy. He felt the world had turned against him.
Elderly and respectable civil servants are shouting [he wrote] that, having dared to speak like that about civil servants, I hold nothing sacred. The policemen are against me, the merchants are against me, the literary clique is against me. They abuse me and go to see my play; all the tickets for the fourth performance are sold out…2
With what eagerness he had worked on this play and how he had looked forward to its production! Upon completing it, he had written to Pogodin in jubilation:
Now let us laugh, let us laugh as much as possible, Long live Comedy!3
What sweat and energy in order to break down the objections of the censors—and it was only through the steps taken by Zhukovsky and Aleksandra Smirnova, lady-in-waiting to the Empress, that he had finally succeeded in breaching the barricades of opposition. He had already before this abandoned a satire on bureaucracy, The Vladimir Cross, in which an ambitious but empty-headed government official aspires to this honor with such a fanatic intensity that he dreams of being turned into the Cross. Instead he had composed a harmless though highly amusing comedy of middle-class life, The Marriage, a subject at which, he said, “even the police commissioner would not be offended.” “But what good is a comedy devoid of truth and malice?”4 “Malice, laughter, and salt,” were not these the necessary ingredients? In desperation he had turned to Pushkin,
Give me [he implored] anything for a subject and I will compose a comedy in five acts, I swear, that it will be funnier than the very devil.5
Pushkin may indeed have suggested the subject of The Government Inspector, out of his own similar experience, but the theme of mistaken identity has innumerable analogues in literature, and it is very likely that Gogol drew on many other sources for hints that he amalgamated into his own original version. Yet few of these antecedents could have supplied the genius which went into Gogol’s composition. One merely has to compare Gogol’s comedy with one of its archetypes, undoubtedly familiar to the Russian writer, Die deutschen Kleinstädter (German Provincials), by that most prolific, popular, and mediocre German dramatist Kotzebue, to note what genius can achieve.6
Gogol had undoubtedly struck home. He had lanced that most cankerous sore in Russian society—its general corruption. How prevalent it was—how generally accepted as a common modus vivendi—may be judged from the attitude of Gogol’s mother, a simple, generous and well-intentioned person, who entertained high hopes of her son’s enrichment in the Civil Service from the concomitant perquisites derived from bribes! Even university professors were not immune to such temptations in grading civil service examinations!7
Among the pack of rascals and adventurers he was satirizing, Gogol insisted there was one “honest, noble character there… Laughter.” “Laughter that deepens everything… without whose penetrating force man would be aghast at the emptiness and pettiness of existence.”8 Thus Gogol sanctified Laughter. He had hoped through its agency to cleanse the moral atmosphere. He had miscalculated. He could not have foreseen, of course, its ultimate effect on succeeding generations. The radical writer Chernyshevsky was to epitomize its impact by saying that Gogol had “awakened our self-consciousness.”
In looking back on his literary career in St. Petersburg, Gogol did not have much cause for complaint. He had arrived there in 1818 at the age of twenty, a “raw youth” in quest of a government position but already obsessed by his literary ambitions. In 1831 he leaped into fame as the author of a series of Ukrainian folk tales, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, and had received acclaim and won the friendship of Zhukovsky and Pushkin. With pride he could inform his boyhood friend, Danilevsky,9
Almost every evening we gathered together: Zhukovsky, Pushkin and I. Oh, if you only knew how much that is delightful flows from the pen of these men!
The succeeding five years had been almost continuously productive, as he published another of the Dikanka tales, remarkable short stories in a collection called Arabesques, a historical novelette “Taras Bulba,” a story collection Mirgorod, and a series of comedies.
What young writer embarking on a writing career would not have relished the kind of reception young Gogol experienced at the hands of the greatest poet, himself no mean storyteller, when Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka appeared? For this is what Pushkin wrote in August 1831 in a letter to the magazine, Russky Invalid:
I have just read Evenings by the Dikanka. It astonished me. Here is real gaiety, which is sincere, unforced, without affectation, without pomposity. And in places what poetry! What sensitivity! All that is so unusual for our contemporary literature that I have not yet come to my senses… For God’s sake take his side, if the reviewers in their customary manner attack the indecency of his expressions, the mauvais ton etc. It is high time that we laughed les précieuses ridicules of our literature to scorn, those people who are for ever talking of their “fair readers,” which they have never had, of the highest social circles, to which they are not invited.10
Such was the enviable tribute extended to the raw youth from the Ukrainian province of Poltava, the scion of a lesser-gentry Cossack family. His father, a sickly man with literary pretensions, died when the boy was sixteen, By that time his mother, who had married at the age of fourteen, had borne twelve children, few of whom survived. She was a simple, unsophisticated and very superstitious woman, who, after her husband’s death, proved far from an efficient manager of the family’s estate at Vasilyevka. Nikolay Gogol, her son, was the apple of her eye: upon him she lavished her affection and in him she placed her hopes. Deeply religious, she filled her children’s imaginations with pictures of otherworldly bliss attendant upon a good life here on earth, and horrifying visions of the tortures to which sinners were exposed in the eternal flames of hell. High-strung, sensitive, Nikolay never outgrew this kind of “education.” Whatever his own psychological and physical disposition, there can be little doubt that the terrors described with such vividness impressed themselves forcefully upon his imagination and in later years formed a part of his obsessional character. He dreamt of St. Petersburg and a literary career. His mother dreamt of the high offices that would fall to her precocious son, despite a mediocre school record that could at best win him an inferior rank in the official hierarchy of government clerks.
St. Petersburg at first proved far from the hospitable haven and heaven he had imagined. Believing himself to be a poet, he had composed an “idyl” entitled Hans Küchelgarten and had it printed in St. Petersburg at his own expense under the pseudonym of V. Alov. But he soon suffered a traumatic shock. The few reviews that deigned to notice the poem were devastating. The young would-be poet bought up the bookseller’s remaining copies and burned them. This was a very perspicacious stroke of self-criticism: Gogol realized he was no poet.
The “idyl” in “eighteen pictures” was no worse than hundreds of such idyls and pastorals that had flourished during the preceding century, most of them inspired by a celebrated poem, Luise, by the German poet J. H. Voss. Gogol’s German hero, a true German romantic, has his allotment of Weltschmerz—that indefinite cosmic yearning swelled by vaporous aspirations and restlessness. Like his predecessors he must “wander” abroad. Roaming as far as Greece but never finding the world he is seeking, he finally settles down to a constructive and peaceful domesticity, in secure Gemütlichkeit, a cozy bourgeois existence, with his ever-patient beloved. The only element in common between Hans and Nikolay Gogol, so far as this poem is concerned, is the Wanderlust—his need to “get away”—which was to be one of Gogol’s lifelong obsessions.
But his literary auto-da-fé did not deter Gogol from pursuing literary ambitions. He turned to prose fiction, and in the process of realizing himself in that medium, he, along with Pushkin, inaugurated a new era of prose in Russian literature. For Pushkin was publishing his remarkable prose tales at practically the same time. Both Pushkin and Gogol were, in their way, responding to the needs and requirements of a growing readership eager for new ideas, new forms, presented in imaginative terms and less susceptible to the strictures and vagaries of censorship. And what was even more remarkable, Gogol was presenting life—but life spiced with such laughter as to astonish readers who, in Pushkin’s estimation, hadn’t laughed like that in many years.11
The laughter of which Pushkin speaks was to resound often, and with deeper notes, as Gogol’s horizon expanded artistically through a widening life-experience. But these folk-tales of Ukrainian life, the Dikanka tales, with their rich colloquial sensuousness, with their earthiness, catch the full savor of Ukrainian village communities, their inhabitants and their superstitions. Despite the surrounding laughter, many of these tales are actually ridden with terror, full of witchcraft and Satanic incursions. Such terrors, witches and devils were not—as they might have been for E. T. A. Hoffmann and his successors in provincial but sophisticated Germany, or for the British, or French—an aesthetic game, brilliantly enacted but none the less not to be taken too seriously. Among the impoverished peasant and serf populations of the Russian village, and even the Russian town, they were realities; even among the isolated landowners as well as the more worldly Cossack settlements, the hold of the supernatural was strong indeed. That which one’s own efforts could not attain to—riches, love, a husband or wife—appeals to the Devil and his cohorts might achieve. And how delightful, too, if one could at times outwit those infernal spirits and pay them back for the frights they engendered! In one of the stories, the beautiful but haughty Oksana must have the Tsarina’s shoes before she will consent to accept the burly, handsome but poor blacksmith Vakula. Vakula succeeds in obtaining mastery of the Devil and wins not only the Tsarina’s shoes, but Oksana as well. But the tales that boast of successes over Satan are balanced by those accompanied by frightful consequences. Thus, the peasant Petro, alas! too poor to marry the girl he loves, falls into the clutches of Satan’s alter ego, is lured to search for a hidden treasure, and murders an innocent child. A daughter, in another tale, discovers that her new, very beautiful stepmother is actually a witch, and drowns herself. But the full acme of terror and tragedy is reached in “A Terrible Vengeance,” which mingles horror with incest, when an Antichrist figure, burdened with an inherited curse, brings destruction on his own daughter, her husband, and himself.12
There was also another world, not ridden, it is true, by witches and devils of a supernatural order, but no less filled with darkness and terror—the world of one’s interior, with one’s own Satanic spirits, one’s own devils, one’s own panics and nightmares. Already in Dikanka Gogol had included such stories as that of “Ivan Shponka,” a simple, naive and withdrawn ex-lieutenant, whose only joy in life consisted in attending to his duties. On retiring and taking over his family estate, he is persuaded by his aunt to court a neighboring lady. The prospect of such a step triggers a trauma:
Ivan Fyodorovich stood as though thunderstruck. It was true that Marya Grigoryevna was a very nice-looking young lady, but to get married! It seemed to him so strange, so peculiar, he couldn’t think of it without horror. Living with a wife! Unthinkable! He would not be alone in his own room, but they would always have to be two together!…
And then he has a grotesque dream.
… He was running and running, as fast as his legs could carry him. Now he was at his last gasp. All at once someone caught him by the ear. “Ouch! Who is it?” “It’s me, your wife!” a voice resounded loudly in his ear, and he woke up. Then he imagined he was married, that everything in their little house was so peculiar, so strange: a double bed stood in his room instead of a single one; his wife was sitting on a chair. He felt queer: he did not know how to approach her, what to say to her, and then he noticed that she had the face of a goose. He happened to turn aside and saw another wife, also with the face of a goose. Turning again, he saw yet another wife; and behind him a fourth… Then he suddenly dreamed that a wife was not a human being at all, but a sort of woollen material; then he went into a shop in Mogilyov. “What sort of stuff would you like?” asked the shopkeeper. “You had better take a wife, that is the most fashionable material! It wears well! Everyone is having coats made of it now.” The shopkeeper measured and cut off a wife. Iven Fyodorovich put her under his arm and went off to a Jewish tailor. “No,” said the Jew, “that is poor material. No one has coats made of that now.”13
One need not be a specialist in the workings of the human mind to note at once the very significant and peculiar elements in this narrative. What they meant so far as the writer himself was concerned will become more apparent when his later works are examined. At this point one may merely indicate a few guideposts: evasion and flight—in this case from a close relationship with a woman; the transformation of the woman in the nightmare into a creature of the animal world, or into an object—what might be called the “reification” of the human element and an alienation from it. A later comedy, Marriage, presents a more realistic treatment of the same theme: the protagonist-suitor jumps out of a window at a critical moment in order to escape commitment. As in the story, so in the play, the grotesquerie of the situation is brilliantly merged with seriousness—anxiety and terror. We may add, also, that in Gogol’s supernatural stories the devils are frequently playful fellows, the witches, on the other hand, invariably baneful.
The years between 1831 and 1836 were for Gogol notably creative ones. St. Petersburg inspired his genius and offered him the characters and background for his most celebrated short stories, especially those concerned with the “little nobodies”—the civil servants—ample material for satire, the grotesque, as well as the pathetic. It was at this time that he composed “The Nose,” and “The Diary of a Madman.” His interest in the Ukraine, Ukrainian history and Cossack life found lively realization in the short prose-epic of “Taras Bulba,” lusty, bloody, broad and brutal. He resigned his official government position and turned teacher, first at a girls’ institute, later as lecturer in history at the University of St. Petersburg. Totally unfitted for an academic career, he concluded it after what he called “sixteen inglorious months of… humiliation,” with a resounding fiasco. He was not a professional historian, he was not made to be a teacher, and he was a poor judge of his own abilities. Young Ivan Turgenev, one of students, testifies to this “tragi-comedy”:
I attended Gogol’s lectures in 1835 when he was teaching history at St. Peterburg University. To tell the truth, this “teaching” was carried on in a peculiar manner. First of all, Gogol was sure to miss two lectures out of three; secondly, even when he did appear on the rostrum, he didn’t speak, but whispered something rather incoherent, showed us little etchings with views of Palestine and other oriental countries, and was extremely embarrassed throughout the whole period… During the final examination in his subject, he sat there with a kerchief tied around his head, allegedly because he was suffering from a toothache, with an expression of utter despondency on his face, and didn’t even open his mouth… As if it were today, I see his lean, long-nosed figure before me, with the two ends of a black silk kerchief sticking up high above his head, looking like ears…14
In May 1836, the year of The Inspector General, he wrote to his friend Pogodin:
A modern writer, a comic writer, a writer of memoirs, must be as far away from his homeland as possible.15
This was written a month after his departure from Russia in the company of his good friend Danilevsky. Except for two brief sojourns in his fatherland, he was to remain away from 1836 to 1848. He was taking with him a few chapters of a new novel which he had begun in 1835. It is hard to enter into Gogol’s feelings at this time—but there is no question that there was an upsetting turmoil within him, a restlessness, a fever that was to drive him from place to place and take him to Paris, to Rome, even to Jerusalem. At the same time he was also in high spirits. To Zhukovsky he wrote,
I swear that I shall do something that no ordinary man could do. I feel a lion’s strength in my soul and I can almost feel the transition from childhood, spent in school exercises, to manhood.16
Whatever it is that he was fleeing from or fleeing towards, he felt that he was under the special guidance of Heaven, and in the same letter to Zhukovsky insisted:
My present withdrawal from my fatherland has been decreed from above by the same great Providence sent for my education. This is the great turning point, a great epoch of my life. I will not return soon for anything in the world. I shall stay abroad as long as I can.
He roamed the cities of the continent. Now he was in Paris, where he sought out Adam Mickiewicz, attracted no doubt by his messianic mysticism, but scarcely out of a concurrence in Mickiewicz’s political radicalism; he went to Baden-Baden for a cure (he was becoming more and more a hypochondriac); and then to Rome, his only semi-permanent resting place. Rome was to be his refuge from the terrors that haunted him, the terrors within him, but also from that terror he would later call “the horrors and terrors of Russia.” Sporadically he recognized that that there was no such thing as flight from oneself or from one’s land, as he confessed in 1846 in reply to a troubled letter from one of his women correspondents:
What you report to me in secret, is only a small part of the story. Were I to tell you all that I know (and I doubtless do not know all), your spirits would be darkened, and your sight blinded, and you would think of only one thing: How can I flee from Russia? But where should one flee? That is the question. The situation in Europe is even more difficult than that of Russia.17
The tragic death of Pushkin served further to unsettle him and reinforce his decision. Urged by his friend Pogodin to return to Russia, Gogol asks, “What for? To repeat the fate of poets in my homeland?”
In Rome he felt most at ease. Here was an almost paradisiacal haven. Here he felt safe when he returned from his various feverish excursions. He could not savor enough of the air, the monuments, the atmosphere of Rome’s medieval antiquity. Here he shut himself off from the political stirrings that were agitating Italy. In the cloistered medievalism of the Papal domains he worked, at times with fierce intensity, to complete his prose “poem”—as he called it—the novel Dead Souls, which he had brought with him. Italy and the novel were now his obsessions. Italy, he wrote to Zhukovsky, was “his.” “No one in the world will take her away from me. I was born here.” He feasted on her magnificent beauty, and shouted with exuberance, “Life, life, a little more of life!”18
It was with the same febrile intensity, once the spirit moved him, that he would turn to writing the novel. Pavel Annenkov, who has left us one of the most vivid chronicles describing his contemporaries, graphically depicts Gogol in Rome, entirely shut off from the world outside. Just as in Paris he had remained indifferent to political events, believing it was not the business of a poet to “intrude into the world’s market-place,” so in the Papal States he scarcely took note of the stirs and tensions in the political arena.
During his European stay, Gogol tended more and more to associate himself with Russian aristocratic families, among them that of Princess Smirnova, the Balabins, and the Volkonskys. The Princess Volkonsky tried to convert him to Roman Catholicism, to which she herself adhered. He was already something of a celebrity as a writer, greatly admired for his stories and welcomed in many of the prominent households both in Russia and abroad. Flattered, and listened to with interest, he began developing a tendency to consider himself a kind of bard-prophet, whose “pure, spotless soul speaks only to God.” There were, of course, those who admired him genuinely for his great literary talent and saw in him the natural heir of Pushkin. Others tended to see him as a useful and gifted as well as highly articulate pillar of their own conservative, even reactionary, political, social, and religious convictions. Such associations were to exert a serious influence on Gogol’s own spiritual and ideological direction.
The writing of Dead Souls did not always prove easy. Often Gogol felt barren. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, in strange places, inspiration came upon him, and he would begin writing… And he would write and write.
On his second return to Russia in the fall of 1841, he brought with him the completed first part of Dead Souls. The Moscow censors proved obdurate and refused to pass the book for publication. He was more fortunate in St. Petersburg, where the friendship of Zhukovsky availed much, aided by the good sense of censor Aleksandr Nikitenko. Gogol acquiesced in certain of the required modifications, and the book appeared at the beginning of June 1842.
Gogol described his tribulations with the Moscow censor in his own humorous way: “The committee” of censors, he wrote, received the book
as though they had been prepared for it, and were attuned to playing a comedy. For all their objections were without exception farcical to the highest degree. As soon as the chairman of the committee, Golokhvastov, heard the title, Dead Souls, he cried in the voice of an ancient Roman: “No, this I shall never allow. A soul is immortal. There cannot be a dead soul. The author is taking up arms against immortality.”19
There were other brain-athletes who saw in the book an attack on the institution of serfdom. However, the book did appear, with the slightly modified title of The Adventures of Chichikov, or, Dead Souls.
* * *
Seven years before the publication of Dead Souls, Gogol had written to Pushkin, who had vaguely suggested the theme:
I have begun writing Dead Souls. The subject has already expanded into a very long novel and I think it’s going to be very funny. But now I have stopped in the third chapter. I am looking for a good slanderer with whom I might get acquainted. In this novel I should like to show the whole of Russia, even if only from one side.20
By the time Gogol completed the first part of Dead Souls, he had found not only the slanderer but many other characters and situations to fill out the vast canvas he was projecting. In the process of creating, Gogol changed much, and as happens so often in the career of great writers, the work became enlarged not only physically, but also in richness and depth. It was the heir of a host of literary traditions and literary works, styles, manners, subjects—as happens with any grand masterpiece—but the addendum of that magic element called genius crystallized it into something new and unique. In searching for antecedents and analogues of Dead Souls one can easily trace the impress of Homer, Cervantes, Laurence Sterne; the picturesque elements of the “picaro” or “rogue” romances; and, not least, Russian folklore and folk life.
Gogol called his novel a Poema—a “Poem”—meaning thereby an epic, a term frequently employed for a prose novel of some extent. In place of a grand Homeric hero, however, we are presented with Russia’s grand “anti-hero,” Pavel Ivan Chichikov. And we are introduced to him at once:
V vorota gostinnitsi gubernskovo goroda NN….
A rather smart little chaise on springs—such as is favored by bachelors, half-pay lieutenant-colonels, staff captains, and landowners with about a hundred serfs—in short, all such as are spoken of as “gentlemen of a middling sort,”—drove through the gates of an inn in the provincial town of NN. In the chaise sat a gentleman, who could be called neither handsome, nor homely, not too stout, but not too thin; it could not be said that he was old—nor was he very young either…21
What would this Pavel Ivanovich be doing in the provincial town of NN? We are soon told: He is buying serfs. But strangely enough, he is buying not live serfs; for that, he is not rich enough. It is dead serfs—“dead souls”—that he is after. Serfs in that day were taxable property, and a government census was taken every ten years. Serfs who had died in the interim remained on the tax-rolls, a liability on the landowners. One day our “hero” had the brilliant idea—while at work in a government office and at his wits’ end as to how to re-establish himself financially—of buying up such “dead souls,” and (since serfs could be mortgaged to the State Treasury for considerable sums) mortgaging them, enriching himself, and leading a good life. At the same time he would be relieving the seller of a burdensome debt.
Chichikov—to carry forward the epic analogue—is Gogol’s Ulysses. In his chariot he will course the Russian provinces in quest of his new self, and wealth. This may indeed be a purpose more mundane than that of Ulysses; but then, the world that Chichikov is exploring is so different from that of Ulysses’s day. But like Ulysses—in Tennyson’s poem—Chichikov too must explore “manners, climates, councils, governments.” Like any modern shrewd trader, he must explore the “territory” so as to gauge the possibilities of success. He must make the acquaintance of the foremost citizens of the provincial town—the local governor, the district judge, the postmaster, the police commissioner, and, of course, the landowners who might be willing to cooperate in his strange enterprise…
Chichikov is astute and engaging. The local gentry take to him; he is invited to dinners, at which his inquiries seem matters of course: How many serfs has so-and-so? Have there been any epidemics in the vicinity? Many deaths among the serfs?
And now we meet them, one by one—the gallery of landowners, a most remarkable collection. There’s Manilov, the embodiment of a feudal laissez-faire. Nothing in his house is ever finished; the book he is reading is always open to page 14. He is even willing to give Chichikov his “dead souls” for nothing! Chichikov capers with delight. For, mind you, this fellow Chichikov is a great actor. Though his own career has been checkered by not a few peccadilloes and minor transgressions, he manages to put on the act of someone who has suffered innumerable persecutions. “What have I not suffered… for having followed the path of justice,” he cries, almost in tears, and for “being true to my conscience!”
Then we meet Madame Korobochka, herself an astute trader, who acquiesces once Chichikov promises her other “government contracts.” There is Nozdrev, a fantastic scapegrace of a landlord, a liar, a gambler, a backbiter, a tale-bearer, a master at insults, a cheat out of a sheer love of cheating, who grows very angry when exposed. Chichikov barely escapes with his skin intact, but without any serfs…
And Sobakevich (as in all other instances in Gogol’s story, each name has a meaning, and sobaka means “dog”) has a face “broad and round as a Moldavian pumpkin,” while his wife’s is “long and narrow as a cucumber, crowned with a cap.” It seems that nature, in shaping Sobakevich’s face had eschewed using such fine tools as a file or gimlet, but had rough-hewn him with an axe, and formed his eyes with a drill. But he is no slouch of a trader himself. “‘You are in need of dead souls,’ Sobakievich inquired with simplicity, without a show of surprise, as if they were talking about bread.” He had penetrated Chichikov’s soul. And he asks the astonishing price of a hundred rubles apiece.
Long before the term “black humor” was invented, Gogol had mastered it. The scene with Sobakevich is one of the many supreme examples. When he is faced by an outraged Chichikov, Sobakevich is amazed. “Why,” he explains, “they are all craftsmen and sturdy peasants,” and he retails their particular aptitudes, skills, and virtues! He grows eloquent. When Chichikov counters that they are dead, Sobakevich retorts, “You’re trying to buy them, so that means they are worth something. They are wanted.” He finally sells the serfs at two and a half rubles apiece…
We are in the realm of the epic grotesque. Homeric laughter turned into the macabre of the modern market.
There is more, much more. There is still Plyushkin, the epic miser, owner of a thousand serfs, possessor of a neglected estate fallen into decay, yet whose granaries and storehouses are filled to the bursting point. For Plyushkin saves everything, and all around him is colossal disorder. Unlike other landowners, he is gaunt, and his chin is so prominent that he is forced to cover it with a handkerchief whenever he spits. His eyes scurry like mice, and are as watchful. Chichikov’s heart bounds with delight when he learns that a fever has killed off many of Plyushkin’s peasants, and that since the last census there are some one hundred and twenty “dead souls.” There is one more touch in this particular scene that will serve for hundreds of potential descriptions of Plyushkin’s miserliness. He summons his little thirteen-year-old servant Proshka, who appears “wearing such large boots that he seemed to be stepping out of them as he walked.” For Plyushkin keeps only one pair of boots for all his servants, and this lone pair stands in the hallway ready to accommodate any of the serfs who are to make their entrance.
Now Chichikov is the owner of hundreds of “souls.” Among them are also “live” ones—that is, serfs who have run away. If he mortgages all of them he will be worth hundreds of thousands of rubles, he will marry and have heirs and become an honored and respectable member of society. Is he a rogue and a scoundrel? And what of the others?
The grotesque is a secular form of exorcism. It has its origin in the urges of defiance: defiance of the horror or terror of life, defiance with twisted laughter. It is recrimination against powers, agencies, forces, natural or supernatural, that threaten human existence, while at the same time it is a form of self-affirmation and affirmation of human power to defy such threats. It is in its way a distortion of sublimity. In the gargoyle it is plastic incantation—fear and broad laughter mingling, a juxtaposition of two contrasting, conflicting elements. In the modern artist it is the unquenchable need to protest against destructive realities by “estranging” them for the spectator, to use a Brechtian term. It recalls such realities by hunting them out of their terrestrial heights or hells—just as the medieval artist sought them out in the trans-terrestrial spheres. Caricature enlarges upon one feature of a phenomenon; the grotesque embraces a totality of experiences.
In Gogol the grotesque is likewise an “exorcism” of the “horror and terror” of the world, this time of Russia. For him the center of his grotesque lies in the juxtaposition of Life and Death. Such a grotesque can assume many forms; it can range from the gentle to the savage; from the ridiculous to the sardonic; from the pathetic to the tragic; from the eerie to the macabre. Gogol’s overall mastery of the grotesque is revealed in the drama of the figurative “exhumation” of already dead serfs, who even during their lifetime of wretchedness and misery were scarcely living creatures, and who are not allowed to rest even in their graves. Traded while they were alive, they are still traded when dead.
They do come to life, these peasant serfs, if only for a brief moment. Back in his hotel room, Chichikov begins to go over the rolls of his “acquisitions.” As he reads over the names and the crafts of the “souls,” Chichikov reflects:
Goodness, dear chaps! How many of you are crowded in here! And what did you do, dear souls, in your lifetime? How did you manage to get along? Accidentally his eyes rested on one name. It was that of Pyotr Savelyev, nicknamed “You’ve put your foot in it,” an ancient serf belonging to Madame Korobochka. And again he could not refrain from saying, “My, how lanky he is! He stretches across the whole line!” Were you a craftsman or just a common muzhik? And what sort of death did you die? Was it in a tavern brawl, or did some clumsy wagon run you over in your sleep? An you, Stepan Probka, Stepan “the Cork,” carpenter, and model of sobriety! Ah, Stepan Probka, carpenter, and model of sobriety! Giant of a man, fit to join the Guards! How you must have trudged the provinces, axe in belt, boots slung over the shoulder, eating a kopeck’s worth of bread and two kopecks worth of dried fish, though I wager you carried home a hundred or so rubles in silver in your bag each time, or a note sewed up in your hempen breeches or stuck in your boot! Where did you meet your death? Did you climb up the church steeple, or perhaps even try to reach the cross, and did you slip down from the cross-beam, and strike the ground with a thud, and some Uncle Mikhey, who was standing by, scratched the back of his neck, and said, “Ekh, Vanya, this time you’ve really done it!” And tying a rope around him, began climbing in your place?…
And what about you dear chappies? he went on, casting his eyes on the list on which Plyushkin’s runaway serfs were inscribed. You’re still alive, but what’s the good? You might as well be dead. Where have your nimble legs carried you? Were you so badly off with Plyushkin? Or are you roaming and scouring the highways? Are you in jail, or have you found new masters for whom you plough the land?22
It is a piece of triumphant irony on the part of Gogol to bring Chichikov into human contact with peasant-serfs who are dead and gone, and even bring him to express some feeling about them, when during his whole lifetime he probably hadn’t given a moment’s thought or attention to their plight while they were alive! Chichikov, like Gogol himself, takes serfdom for granted, as if it had been deliberately designed by God.
Chichikov’s star is at its apogee. He has become a legend in the district. The population endows him with qualities unnoted before. The ladies buzz about him. But he is not aware that he is teetering on the brink of disaster. Yes, the official transactions (aided by some subtle bribery) have all gone well. But alas! who could have predicted that at a public ball, at which he is the center, and where he pays court to the governor’s lovely daughter, a bomb would fall and wreck his putative fortunes! A drunken Nozdrev makes his appearance and unmasks Chichikov not as the “millionaire” he is presumed to be, but as a buyer of dead souls! The jig is up and it is time to run.
Gogol had known all along that he was treading on dangerous ground. But what Russian writer was not? As early as 1836, he had written to Zhukovsky, while he was at work on the novel:
Immensely great is my work, and its end is still far off. New classes of the population and many more people will rise up against me, but I’m afraid that cannot be helped. It is my lot to be in conflict with my fellow-countrymen. Patience! an invisible someone is writing before me with a mighty sceptre. I know that my name after me will be luckier than I and that the descendants of these self-same countrymen of mine will perhaps utter words of reconciliation to my shade with eyes moist with tears.23
In one of the chapters of Dead Souls, Gogol digresses to defend his novel and its hero. There are novelists, he states, who never stoop from their heights to touch the earth and mingle with their “poor, insignificant fellow-creatures, but continue to dedicate themselves to their remote and elevated images.” These achieve ready fame, glory, and applause. But how different is the fate of the writer who has the temerity to present to the readers’ eyes the “horrid slime of trivialities in which our lives are sunk, the inner depths of those cold, petty everyday characters who swarm on our bitter and dreary life’s way.” What critics, Gogol continues, recognize that the “telescope that brings the sun close to us, and the microscope that makes visible for us the movements of unnoticed insects,” are equally wonderful?
“The time has come to harness the rogue.” The microscope that Gogol has turned upon Russian humanity, has eschewed the “poor, virtuous hero” favored by other writers—another example of the hypocrisy of the times.
Who is this “rogue” Chichikov? Simply “a proprietary and acquisitive man.” Why then is he “repulsive”? The very people who will turn from him aghast when he appears in a novel, will not disdain to dine with him and pass the time in his company! Is Chichikov any worse than, say, — ? And turning to the reader:
You even guffaw over Chichikov, perhaps you will even praise the author, and say, “My— you must admit, once or twice he really hits the mark. He must be a jolly good fellow! After that, with a double measure of smugness and a smile of self-satisfaction, you add: “One must admit that in certain of our provinces you will find some bizarre and odd characters, a couple of whom might even turn out to be scoundrels!” But how many of you have enough Christian humility to search your conscience in private, and ask yourselves this question: “Don’t I, too, have something of Chichikov in me?” Not one of you, I believe! But should an acquaintance of yours pass by, one, you understand, of middling rank, who of you will refrain from nudging your neighbor, and guffawing: “Look, there goes Chichikov!” and like a youngster, forgetful of the respect due his elders, you will run after him, and tease him: “Chichikov! Chichikov! Chichikov!”24
Early in June 1842, two days after the appearance of Dead Souls, Gogol was off again, bound for the Continent. His collected works in four volumes were to appear toward the end of that year, and among other published and unpublished pieces, contained the comedy “The Marriage”, and Gogol’s most celebrated short story “The Overcoat.” As usual, he was practically without funds, and henceforth would live on and off his friends, borrowing liberally and boarding with them. In both respects he was very fortunate. In their admiration for the writer, though too frequently taxed by his personal eccentricities and demands, they opened both their purses and their houses. Once again he was headed for Rome.
* * *
The year 1842 marks the end of one major epoch in Gogol’s life and the beginning of another. He had reached his apogee as a creative artist. In his mind, however, there were innumerable plans, not the least being a continuation of Dead Souls.
In Dead Souls and in The Inspector General he had given us a picture of the middle gentry—a class mired in banality and dreariness, mediocrity and philistinism. But there was also a nether world, the world of the petty bureaucrat, the world, we might add, “of all of us,” to which he had been and was drawn—a world too of nullities, of victims. Here there is no room for Homeric parodies; here we have little epics of degradation of which an earlier story, “The Diary of a Madman” (which had appeared in the collection Arabesques), the narrative of “Captain Kopeikin” (included as the postmaster’s story in Dead Souls), and “The Overcoat” (published in 1842), may be taken as the prime exemplars.
In the drab figure of the chinovnik, the government clerk of low degree, Gogol embodied the tragi-comedy of poshlost—the platitude, banality and humdrum, even hopelessness of life, with its failed search for some illusory dream-fulfilment—the creation of an imaginary “double” that might in some measure justify a mean existence. Such a character is Poprishchin in “The Diary of a Madman,” a government clerk gone mad, who finds escape in the insane illusion that he is the Spanish King Ferdinand VII, and understands the language of dogs, and can read their correspondence. He has his own “holy grail”—his eyes are fixed on the unattainable daughter of his Director, the destined bride of a Court Chamberlain. Poprishchin is forty-five years old, forever tethered to his inferior clerk’s office, contemned by his immediate superior, his “chief.” He finds his deepest joy in sharpening the quills of the Director and in catching a glimpse of the “Beatrice” of his aspirations.
The chinovnik is Gogol’s Everyman, the ignoble forerunner of that long line of the “insulted and injured” destined to wend their way through Russian literature and unmoor the consciousness and conscience of innumerable readers. Of course, Gogol’s “little man” is not a newcomer to Russian literature. He had a number of predecessors, notably in Pushkin’s The Brazen Horseman.25 But no one before Gogol had so deeply imprinted the character on Russian literature, as Dostoevsky was to testify. Neither French nor British literature has created his equal. Dickens’ “Shabby-Genteel Man,” of the Sketches by Boz, is Poprishchin’s bourgeois British counterpart, but he never experiences the feeling of degradation and the self-torment of the Russian while he sits thumbing through books in the British Museum.
How could a Poprishchin and hundreds of his fellows ever hope to liberate themselves? How ever climb up that spiraling stair that runs from the lowest grade of collegiate councillor to titular councillor, collegiate assessor, and up, up to the empyrean heaven of General, Privy Councillor, and beyond? The heavy boot on the rung above presses hard on the shoulder of one below. How could one ever dare turn one’s face and head so as to be able to look into the frozen face above? And every rank meek and groveling before a superior! Sometimes one can stand it no longer, and momentarily one rebels. Poprishchin obliterates this horror of nonexistence in the fantasy of a kingship, and ends in a madhouse where he is beaten. A shrieking Miserere breaks from him:
No, I can’t stand it any longer. My God! what are they trying to do to me?! They pour cold water on my head! They won’t listen to me; they won’t see me; they won’t hear me! What have I done to them? Why do they torment me? What do they want from me, poor creature than I am? What can I give them?… Save me! Take me away! Give me a troika with speedy horses, that will fly like the whirlwind! Take your seat, driver, ring out, ring out my little bell, hasten forward my steeds, and carry me far away from this world! Farther, still farther away, so that nothing can be seen, nothing at all…
The episode of Captain Kopeikin in Dead Souls contains a suggestion of direct rebellion, unfortunately softened and modified by the collaboration of Gogol and the censor. It is a story of bureaucratic ineptitude and heartlessness. This time the victim is a veteran of the wars of 1812, who had lost an arm and a leg defending his Russian fatherland. He returns to Russia and finds himself without any means. He appeals directly to a high official in St. Petersburg, then to a commission, but is put off time and again, until driven to desperation. Furiously he turns upon the members of the commission:
You… you… are… you don’t even know your own duties… You pedlars of the law!…
He is admonished by a very high official, “You must help yourself. Find your own means,” and forcibly escorted out of the building. Placed in a cart, he mutters to himself, “Find your own means? Yes, I will.”
In deference to the censor’s wishes, Gogol changed the character of Kopeikin and turned him into a greedy epicure who makes excessive demands for “cutlets, French wines, and theatre!” Kopeikin squanders the money a high official gives him. But even in the censored version enough came through to make Gogol’s point. What means Kopeikin eventually found is not, of course, made clear. Perhaps, like the hero of Pushkin’s story “Dubrovsky,” he became a brigand…
Gogol’s most triumphant depiction of the chinovnik is without doubt to be found in “The Overcoat.” Here is a small epic of alienation and degradation. Here Gogol struck the full ground-notes of the “little man’s” agonies. Even his name speaks of nothingness. He is called Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. The given patronymics are scatological; and the surname stands for “shoe.” His own colleagues (themselves objects of contempt and persecution by their superiors) heap insults upon him. He earns a bare 400 rubles, and is the perennial titular councillor. Life offers him scant joys, but there is one that is incomparable: He loves to copy documents, and even takes his work home with him (he has no family), in order to continue and complete it. But Petersburg winters are severe; his coat is old and frayed, and can no longer be repaired. He must have a new one made. He will eat less, be careful about the way he walks so as not to wear out his shoes; he will save as much as he can.
Now he dreams his dream: the new overcoat! And he realizes it. With the acquisition of this magnificent garment he becomes a person. Even his colleagues now pay attention to him, and invite him to a party. Thoughts that had slumbered within him now come to the fore—even erotic ones! Unfortunately, going home after the party, in the dark night, he is assaulted by two thieves who rob him of his coat and beat him to the ground. He embarks on a vain search to recover his treasure. To whom shall he turn? First to the police commissioner, then to the Person of Consequence—and in both cases he suffers nothing but arrogance, humiliation and insults. Now, this Person of Consequence had only recently been a Person of No Consequence, and he reprimands Akaky Akakievich for his insolence in not having proceeded through “proper channels” before making his appearance in the grandee’s chambers. Akaky Akakievich staggers out into the cold streets, into the snowstorm, catches cold, and within a few days, dies…
What follows is transcendental phantasy. Rumors spread all over St. Petersburg that a corpse looking much like a government clerk is haunting one of the city’s quarters looking for a stolen overcoat, and in the process stripping coats from passers-by. One of these is none other than the very important Person of Consequence. “So here you are,” the clerk shouts, “at last I’ve got you, and it’s your overcoat I’m taking.” Thereafter the apparition ceases to haunt the city.
As for Akaky—well, he was dead, he had died the death of a “nobody,” and as Gogol put it, “Petersburg carried on without him.” What of the overcoat? That acquired a personality, a life. For can Akaky Akakievich be said to have really lived before he acquired the overcoat? This was his alter ego—his Doppelgänger, his unrealized self come to life. Akaky is what he appears—the overcoat. For a short moment he has broken out of the cage of nonbeing, becomes human, and is recognized as a human being. The fetishism of things has changed him into a human entity, just as it often changes a person into a thing…
In “The Overcoat” we move from the lucid realms of Pushkin into dark corners, the “underside” of human consciousness. We have come upon the “underground” man, who for a moment emerges from the dismal cellars of nothingness into the light of elementary “being.” And for a brief moment, Gogol, who had not customarily given way to this anguish of existence of the No-man, raises a sob-freighted cry through the lips of his madman and utters the muted whimper of Akaky Akakievich, a “creature vanished and departed.” For a moment the frozen hell in which its inhabitants lie congealed is thawed, and a human being emerges…
For Gogol Russia remained a mystery, and, as he believed, would remain a mystery to the rest of the world. An apostrophe included in Dead Souls evokes that mystery:
Nye tak li i ti, Rus, shto boiikaya neobroneemaya troika, neseshsya?
Are you not like that too, Russia, as you speed along like a spirited troika, not to be overtaken? Underneath you, the road smokes, the bridges thunder, all is overtaken and left behind. The passer-by stands amazed, as if struck by a miracle from heaven. May not this be a lightning bolt from heaven? What is the meaning of this terrifying onrush? What mysterious power is it that resides in these horses, unknown to the world? Ekh, your horses! And what horses! Are whirlwinds secreted in your manes? Is there some sharp ear in every one of your veins?… Russia, where are you flying? Answer! She does not answer. The bells tinkle enchantingly; the air is torn to shreds, and whirls like the wind. Everything on earth is flying past you; and askance the other nations and peoples draw aside and make way for her.26
Thus Gogol apostrophizes Russia at the conclusion of the first part of Dead Souls, at the moment when Chichikov is racing away from the town of NN. toward his future destiny. Gogol, too, was on his way to face his destiny, but away from Russia.
Dead Souls met with the same divided reception as The Inspector General. Whatever the interpretations later generations would put on the novel, when academics and others would subject both Dead Souls and “The Overcoat” to various investigations ranging from the mystagogical and allegorical to the psychographic, for Gogol’s contemporaries the meaning of his writing about Russia was clear enough. Gogol was describing the Russia of his day. The censors led the way of interpretation by expunging or having expunged passages that they believed to be incriminating. Critics of the conservative wing had no doubts either: the Bulgarins and their cohorts meted out abuse to Dead Souls with a generosity only too common among critics of all times, sparing neither venom nor vocabulary. In their eyes the novel was the epitome of vulgarity, obscenity, and vilification. Russia, in their opinion, had never before suffered such grievous defamation as now. On the other side, Russian liberals likewise agreed that Gogol’s book had Russia herself in view. For them, the novel was a superlative creation, particularly valuable for its exposure of the poshlost—the vulgarity, meanness, banality—of Russian gentry life. Vissarion Belinsky proclaimed Gogol the leader of the new “natural” school of fiction. Konstantin Aksakov crowned Gogol another Homer. The so-called “younger” generation, that of the 1840s and 1850s, saw in him a guiding light in the war on oppression, hypocrisy, and exploitation, and his novel and stories as the foundation stone of a new social aesthetic.
It is instructive to turn from his critics and interpreters to Gogol himself, when he spoke in his own defense of the life he had depicted in Dead Souls and of his own talent to depict it:
This gift is revealed most forcibly in Dead Souls. If it frightened Russia and produced such an outcry, it is not because it revealed her wounds, her sicknesses, or even because it showed vice triumphant and virtue persecuted. Not at all! My heroes are far from being criminals. All I had to do was to give one of them some sympathetic trait to reconcile my readers with all the characters. But what frightened my public was the overall banality, the fact that my heroes are all of them flat, and that the reader does not find one consoling picture, not the least occasion to rest or breathe easily, so that when he is through with the book, he feels as if he had emerged from some underground basement. I would have been pardoned had I drawn some picturesque monster, but the banality was unforgiveable. The Russian reader is more terrified of his nullity than of his weaknesses and vices.27
He became recognized as posterity’s spokesman. In 1851, Alexander Herzen wrote,
… Dead Souls shook the whole of Russia. It is a picture of her disease, painted by a master hand. Gogol’s art is like a cry of shame and terror on the part of a man who has been degraded by the vulgarity of existence and has suddenly perceived in a mirror his animal-like features. But in order to release such a cry from one’s breast, one must possess some healthy portions of a body as well, and a great capacity for restoring one’s health.28
And Vissarion Belinsky, in 1847:
Gogol’s influence on Russian literature was tremendous. Not only all the young talents hastened along the path he had indicated, but some writers of repute abandoned the path which they had hitherto trodden to follow the new one. Hence the appearance of a school which its opponents thought to belittle by calling it the natural school… His school alone now holds the literary scene.29
Gogol was not aware, of course, that with the publication of Dead Souls and the four-volume edition of his Collected Works, his purely literary career was over. He was to live on another ten years, for six of these still a “pilgrim,” but the sources of creation seemed to have dried up, and the storms that racked his depths cast up no new pearls. It was not that he did not struggle. He strove for the rest of his life to complete his epic of Dead Souls, he tried to redefine his life and his life’s work and clarify his mission. He sought also—and this proved most harrowing—to exorcise the sins he believed were in him, and cleanse his soul through prayer and deed. He was obsessed by the Satan he believed resided within him. In the end he succeeded in this task of self-discipline and self-mortification by killing his body. Trammeled by a sense of guilt that now embraced his published works, seared by penitence, he believed he would achieve redemption through new writings. But there was no retrieval. All the mea culpas, all the peccavis proved ineffectual in loosening the bonds that fettered his creation. The peace of mind and soul that he believed he could attain, not even a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem could achieve. He felt forsaken by God and saw the desiccation of his talents as a punishment from above.
All genius is obsessive; but its obsessions are creative, crystallizing in works of art or science or philosophy. Gogol was now beset as never before, but his obsessions were destructive, contradictory: his self-effacing humility warred with a megalomaniacal arrogance. Now he was down in the dust; now he was proclaiming his mission as prophet to the Russian people—guide, teacher, and prophet, specially designated by God. His masochism knew no bounds. He oscillated between a pathological submissiveness and an equally pathological need to dominate. Whatever his earlier “sins”— whether of carnal onanism or latent homosexuality—he turned them now into incitements to moralistic and spiritual self-flagellation.30
His life became a series of immolations. Just as in his early years he had tried to burn all available copies of Hans Küchelgarten, he destroyed in 1845 the completed portions of the second part of Dead Souls; and in 1852, the year of his death, he again burned a new version of the same work. He then completed his soul’s and body’s immolation by literally starving himself to death.
When the prophetic or apocalyptic urges were upon him he spoke as if the mantle of Elijah had descended upon him. A “wonderful work,” he felt, was perfecting itself within him. He was a “precious vase”—though one still full of cracks, but filled with a treasure. “Oh, believe my words! From now on my word is clothed with the highest power. Everything can disappoint, deceive, betray, but my word will not betray.”31
His friends and associations abroad tended to heighten this mystical fervor. There was the religious Russian painter Ivanov; in Rome, also, the leader of the German Nazarene painters, Friedrich Johann Overbeck; the Catholic Princess Aenaida Volkonskaya; Polish exiles strongly tinged with messianic mysticism; the recently deceased young Count Vielgorsky, whom Gogol had tended with almost a lover’s devotion in his last illness; and not least, the ever-present Aleksandra Smirnova. The women found in Gogol a particularly persuasive teacher, whose prestige no doubt would also make for converts.
He began soon, if not to abjure his earlier works, to reinterpret them in the light of his own new visions. Rarely has a great writer so virulently disparaged and derogated his creations. “I do not like my works that have been written or published till now, especially Dead Souls,” he wrote to Smirnova, after he had burned the new chapters of the book. He warned her not to be taken in superficially by the overt themes of the novel. The work, he now protested, had nothing to do with Russian provincial life or with a few monstrous landowners. It contained a “secret” which would be revealed in succeeding volumes.32 It is possible that he was saying this out of his new-born honesty. But less pleasing are his remarks to the notorious minister Uvarov, who had reproached him with the tendencies to be found in his novels and stories. Gogol promised to reform, and to compose a work far more useful than his former “scribblings,” for which, he said, Uvarov would be grateful, and much closer to Uvarov’s own “convictions.”33
He would now make clear to people how they had misinterpreted the intention and meaning of his previous works, and reveal their true secret significance by producing a new book that would at once astonish, electrify them, and disclose an altogether new Gogol…
He proceeded to allegorize The Inspector General by unfolding its “secret.” Of course, such a town as depicted in the play does not really exist. Well, he continues, what
if this town is really our spiritual town, and is to be found in every one of us?… Say what you will, but the government inspector who is waiting for us at the entrance of the grave is terrifying indeed. Why pretend? This government inspector is our awakening conscience, which forces us suddenly to take a good look at ourselves. From this government inspector nothing will be hidden, because he is sent by the Almighty… Khlestakov is… our frivolous, earthly conscience… Through him we will never uncover anything in our soul…34
Is it any wonder that recent critics, having been granted this passport and visa and freedom to allegorize Gogol, have allowed their own predilections and bents free play, even if at total variance with what Gogol himself had once stated? Thus one noted scholar transforms “The Overcoat” into Gogol’s reprobation of the passion for earthly goods (i.e., an overcoat), and a parable on the need for self-denial and the consequences of a failure to devote oneself to one’s soul.35 Another well-known authority, Vladimir Nabokov, sees in our friend Chichikov a kind of “ill-paid representative of the Devil, a traveling salesman from Hades.”36
To prove that he was actually “atoning for the uselessness of everything I have published until now,” he set about writing a work containing “thoughts more needful to men than in my works.” This was the Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, which appeared early in January, 1847. It was to be both a confessio fidei and a handy manual for the moral, political, religious, and social guidance of Russians, high and low. Governors of provinces as well as their wives are addressed with magisterial authority on how to conduct themselves and their affairs, and they and others are counseled on how best to bring about a restoration of the moral, political, religious and social order.
The recipe may be summed up as a recall to a “patriarchal” society as of yore, under the tutelage of the Russian Church, an absolute monarch and a “noble” aristocracy.
This Church, which since the time of the Apostles has preserved her pristine purity, like a chaste virgin, this Church, with her profound teachings and her minutest external ceremonies, descended directly from Heaven for the sake of the Russian people, is capable of resolving all doubts and questions. In the face of all of Europe, she is capable of the greatest and most unheard of miracles—for she can induce all estates, offices and occupations to keep within their assigned limits, without shaking or overturning the State, she can make Russia great and powerful, and astonish the entire world through a well-framed harmonious order of an organism….37
Like the Church, so too the Russian Tsar is an agent “ordained, anointed by the Lord for the enlightenment of the people” who, though not responsible to any one at all, yet carries the awe of responsibility within him; who “perhaps sheds bitter tears in secret of suffering and anguish.”
Having vindicated Orthodoxy and Absolutism, Gogol turned his attention to the landowner, whom he addresses as follows:
Call all your peasants together, and explain to them what you are and what they are. That you are their landowner, because you were born a landowner, and because you will have to answer to God if you give up this calling for another. That everyone must serve God in that station in which he has been placed, and not in another. So they, the peasants, having been born under the authority of the landowner, must obey this authority, because there is no authority which is not from God. You must show them the New Testament, so that they will be convinced. Furthermore, you must tell them that you are making them work not because you need money for your pleasures and enjoyments, and to prove this, burn a few banknotes in their presence—and do it so, that they are convinced that money means nothing to you. Say to them that you are having them work because it is the will of God. God has commanded man to earn his bread by labor and by the sweat of his brow… To teach a peasant to read, to enable him to read all those vapid books which the European humanitarians issue for the common people, is sheer nonsense. The peasant has not time for it anyway. The village priest can tell the peasant more of what is needful to him than all this book-rubbish… Actually they must not know that there are other books in the world aside from the Holy Bible…38
The peasant should be told that if he works diligently for “a year or so,” he can become “as rich as Croesus”…
As for the aristocracy, Gogol characterizes them as “the flower of our people,” remarkable for their “moral nobility,” a gift of God, and destined for the education of “all of Russia,” especially the peasantry, who could become the models for all of Europe. This Letter, addressed to a “Personage in High Office,” was censored, perhaps because it also contained some sombre reflections on the moral condition of Russia, where, as Gogol put it, it is “difficult to govern,” because of the numerous abuses prevalent. “There is not a single man in our country who is not to some extent guilty, so that it is impossible to say at first who is more guilty than another.”39
Interspersed with these letters were others of an autobiographical nature, mostly apologies for the writer’s failure to complete the second part of Dead Souls, and for the destruction of what had already been written—all ordained by the Lord, along with promises that out of these destructions a new work, like a “phoenix out of its ashes,” would arise, purified and transfigured. “My task is the Soul… When the proper hour strikes, that upon which I have labored painfully for five years, will see completion within a few weeks.”40
That hour was never to strike. But Gogol was soon to learn what it is to feel all the anguish of a humbled pride. With the publication of Selected Passages he had expected at least to be recognized as Russia’s prime writer-pedagogue, if not writer-prophet. What he received, was, in his own words, “a slap in the face.” With very few exceptions, most of his friend were infuriated and outraged. Sergei Aksakov accused Gogol of insulting “God and humanity.”41
Gogol felt as if his prophet’s mantle had been rent and trod in the dust. “I am broken,” he wrote.42 But, as so often before, he consoled himself that it was all from God, and all for the best, a punishment for his arrogance. “I needed such a public slap in the face… God suddenly has spread before me such a heap of treasures.”43 In addition, he prepared a public apologia pro vita sua, An Author’s Confession, a prime example of humility and expostulation. He had hoped, he said, with his book to bring about reconciliation and harmony into the lives of Russians, but instead had only aroused strife and reproaches.
Now he was about to suffer the gravest blow of all.
Vissarion Belinsky, who had once proclaimed the coming of a “Gogol era” and of a new “natural school of literature” with Gogol as its leader, was outraged by the Selected Passages. In a review of it published in The Contemporary, he lashed out against Gogol’s horrifying reactionary proclamations, particularly those that concerned the role of the Russian Church, the education of the peasantry, and the disparagement of the journalistic activities of the Belinsky group and their preoccupation with contemporary letters. The review found its target in the now vulnerable author. Gogol took the attack very personally and replied in a letter in which he asserted that he could not understand Belinsky’s anger, for he had always believed that Belinsky was a good human being, free of malice.
Vissarion Belinsky was then at an Austrian spa, in Salzbrunn, when Gogol’s letter was forwarded to him. He was already mortally ill of tuberculosis. (He would die in 1848.) He wrote a reply to Gogol, which, though it was not published until some years later, was circulated in manuscript and copies and almost immediately memorized. It would become one of the most celebrated manifestos—political and literary—of the generation of the forties and the fifties.
Yes [Belinsky wrote], I loved you with all the passion with which a man, bound by ties of blood to his native country, can love its hopes, its glory… on its path of consciousness, development and progress. You have been accustomed for so many years to look at Russia from your beautiful far-away,… you live in and within yourself or with a circle of the same mentality as your own, which is powerless to resist your influence on it. Therefore you failed to realize that Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, asceticism, nor pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment and humanity.
What Russia needed, Belinsky continued, was not sermons or prayers, but an awakened sense of human dignity, rights and laws conforming with common sense and justice.
Instead of which she presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without even the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a human being.
At a time when
the most vital of national problems in Russia… are the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment,
Russia’s “great writer,” who had enabled her in the past to look at herself as though in a “mirror,” comes out with a book teaching barbarian landowners how to make still greater profits out of their peasants! Had Gogol really been inspired by the “truth of Christ and not by the teachings of the Devil,” he would have instructed the landowner that
since his peasants are his brethren in Christ, and since a brother cannot be slave to his brother, he should either give them their freedom or at least allow them to enjoy the fruits of their own labor to their greatest possible benefit…
But this Gogol did not do. What right did he have to mix up Christ in his preachments, and laud the Orthodox Church and base his teachings on her, a Church “which has ever been the servant of despotism”! Gogol speaks of his spiritual conversion and of going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem:
He who is capable of suffering at the sight of other people’s oppression bears Christ within his bosom and has no need to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and Stygian darkness, panegyrist of Tatar morals—what are you about! Look beneath your feet—you are standing on the brink of an abyss!…
If you have had the misfortune of disowning with proud humility your truly great works, you should disown with sincere humility your last book, and atone for the dire sin of its publication by new creations which would be reminiscent of your old ones.44
The impact of Belinsky’s letter, even in its underground circulation, as it passed from hand to hand, was such that L. V. Dubelt, superintendent of the secret police— the “Third Section,” as it was called—regretted that he was not able to make its author “rot in prison” for that document. I. S. Aksakov wrote to his father, almost ten years after the letter’s appearance, that the name of Belinsky was known “to every one who longs for a breath of fresh air amid the stinking quagmire of provincial life. There is not a single high-school teacher in the gubernia who does not know Belinsky’s letter by heart.”45 In its own way it was to affect hundreds upon hundreds of Russians, and according to Herzen, it became Belinsky’s revolutionary testament to his generation. Among those deeply impressed by the document was young Fyodor Dostoevsky.
* * *
As for Gogol himself, the rest of his life was to be a sort of tragic epilogue. It was as if he were being pursued by the hounds of hell, and fleeing to retrieve his soul. The agony persisted until the moment of his death. It was as if he, like many Russians, were living in anticipation of the coming of Antichrist, in which even the Tsar himself believed. Many years before, in 1835, Gogol described what might seem a prevision of the feelings he was to experience more than ten years later. It was in an early version of a story, “The Portrait.”
For long years the Antichrist has craved to be born… He is choosing man himself for his dwelling-place, and appearing in those persons whose angel seems to have abandoned them at their very birth and who are branded with the terrible hatred towards men and everything that is the work of the Creator… Marvel… at the terrible power of the devil. He strives to make his way into everything; into our deeds, into our thoughts, and even into the inspiration of the artist… It is the same black spirit which forces itself upon us even in moments of the purest and holiest meditations.46
He who had once felt he had access to special illuminations now stood like one utterly forsaken by God, who, in his words, “has withdrawn from me for a long time the capacity for literary creation.” He began to wonder whether he had not lost faith. Nothing seemed to help. Beleaguered by demons, he thought a pilgrimage to Jerusalem might purify and restore him, and early in February 1848 he left Russia. His disrupted state of mind can hardly be described. He had been staying at the house of his fanatical friend Count A. P. Tolstoy, who had put him in touch with the man who was to become Gogol’s spiritual mentor—the priest Matvey Konstantinovsky, destined also to be Gogol’s homme fatal, the whipping rod of Gogol’s conscience and the goad to his self-destruction. On the eve of his departure for Palestine, Gogol had written to him:
Oh, my friend, my confessor, sent me by God! I burn with shame, and do not know where to hide me from the infinite multitude of weaknesses and vices, which I did not even suspect existed… It even seems to me that I have no religion. I confess the GodMan in Christ, but it is my reason, and not my faith that commands it… I only wish to believe, and in spite of this I now dare to go on a pilgrimage to our Savior’s Tomb! Oh, pray for me!47
But even at the Holy Sepulchre his heart did not “know how to pray.” And on his return he felt no better. He was now almost totally the possession of Father Matvey, a powerful fanatic from Rzhev, rabid persecutor of dissenters, filled also with a hatred of secular culture. Whether in his presence in Moscow, or at a remove from him, Gogol was always made aware how close he was to being immersed in a “pool of iniquities.”
Yet he persevered in the composition of Dead Souls, and even read a few of the new chapters to his friends. How far he had gone by the end of 1851 it is hard to say. We do know that he had completed at least eleven chapters. To what extent Father Matvey was responsible for Gogol’s final decision to destroy his work can only be conjectured. Such decisions require profound psychic collaboration. Gogol’s internal panics, his fear of damnation, proved only part of the motives for such destruction. From the few surving chapters of Part Two of Dead Souls, dating from around 1845, we can perceive that there might have been a basic reason for the action. Alas! the sap of creation was drained; the imagination had withered; here and there only a sad hint of the greatness of a past day; the rest is all dead branches.
He had dreamt of a kind of Dantesque Commedia—the soul’s pilgrimage and ultimate redemption. Chichikov was to be reformed, redeemed, and was to see the light of Heaven. But what steps Chichikov actually takes toward such an approach to Paradiso! He desires to own a vast estate with hundreds of serfs, to amass a fortune, and settle down to the comfortable existence of a landowner. In his progress he does not hesitate to participate in the forgery of a will; he is discovered, punished, and rescued by a good Samaritan, and admonished to good behavior in the future. Gone the broad rich humor, and hearty laughter and satire, the opulent imagery of the first part. How much more human was the “rogue” then!
Gogol was living with Count A. P. Tolstoy in Moscow, when, on a fateful night in February 1852, he decided to burn his works. At three in the morning he called his young servant, and together they consummated the last immolation.
When all the papers were destroyed, he crossed himself, and went back to his room, kissed the boy, lay down on a couch, and broke into tears…48
Now all that remained was to die… The body that had been racked by illness was now subjected to deliberate starvation. The ineptness of his medical counsellors helped him on his last pilgrimage out of this world. Ten days after he had burned his life’s unfulfilled fruits, soul and body of the tortured genius finally achieved peace. He died March 3, 1852.
Gogol’s truly creative life had come to an end ten years before, in 1842. What he had been saying and writing up to then had made the human spirit live and the heart respond. What he was saying in 1847, a new generation no longer understood or wished to hearken to. At the end he was addressing himself to a past, a decaying past, and idealizing it, writing in the spirit of de Maistre and Bonald, such pillars of the Restoration as Metternich and Adam Miller, and Russians like the Benckendorffs and the Uvarovs. Works like the Selected Passages from the Correspondence fill one with tragic sadness. They are dead. But the Government Inspector, “The Overcoat,” Dead Souls, and many of the other tales remain ineffaceable.
The government, always wary of writers, even dead ones, did its best to suppress obituaries. Ivan Turgenev wrote one such: “Gogol is dead!” he wrote.
What Russian heart will not be deeply moved by these words. He is dead… the man whom we now have the right—a bitter right conferred on us by death, to call great.
And he had the added temerity to name Gogol in the same breath as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Griboedov—each of whom had died a violent death, as if this was the due fate of genius in Russia. Turgenev later recalled that, having sent the article to one of the Petersburg journals, he waited in vain for its publication.
Running across the editor of the journal in the street, I asked him why he did not publish it. “You see the sort of climate it is,” he replied allegorically. “I’m afraid it can’t be done.” “But,” I observed, “my article is a most innocent one.” “Innocent or not,” the editor replies, “the point is that we’ve been forbidden to mention Gogol’s name.”
The obituary was finally published in the Moscow News later in March 1852. Turgenev was forthwith arrested, imprisoned for a month for breaking censorship rules, then banished to his country estate.49
With the death of Gogol ends the first great era of Russia’s literary genius. With Pushkin he was to exercise a mighty power over the century and beyond. Gogol belongs with the great satirists of all ages and countries, a brother to Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Swift. He set afoot and inspired the great stream of Russian realism, for despite their grotesque character, Gogol’s novels and stories penetrated into the very core and center of the Russian character and the Russian land and brought an understanding of the “real” or true forces moving both the individual characters and their society. Realism has many mirrors with which to reflect the outward and inward world of human beings and their surroundings, their motivations, and their conflicts. Gogol used the mirror of distortion to achieve his objective—to discover the nexus of forces operative within the world in which he was living, which he was observing, and which—it must be added—like all true artists, he saw with fresh eyes. But the operative forces act not only upon the “outside” reality, they act upon the artist himself. He is product and producer; recipient and innovator. Realism then is the artistic consciousness alerted to the new relations within its world, able to translate them into comprehensible and apprehensible terms. A work is no less realistic if it makes use of forms that do not “mirror” reality with objective detail. True realism consists in the search for and uncovering of the nexus of forces acting upon the lives and actions of characters, giving these characters human depth and variety—fusing, so to speak, the artist’s “I”—his genius, knowledge and insights,—with the “other”—the world outside in its multifaceted plenitude. Myth, symbol, the grotesque may be equally valid as instruments with which to convey the “reality”—the true relations within the world freshly perceived and imaginatively transformed so as to give the reader a new experience of “reality.”
Such too is Gogol’s great achievement, the enlargement and deepening of our consciousness and emotional experience through the grotesque. At the height of his powers he gave Russia the rich creation that inspired others to emerge, so to speak, from “under his Overcoat” and made possible that grand procession of novelists and short-story writers unequalled in any other land. In the tragic dismemberment of his later life he also anticipates that flight into the enclaves of the irrational, the mystical, the obscurantist and fanatical that was itself a mark of Russia’s confusion and convulsion, eventually to culminate in the Rasputinism of a decayed autocracy, and its ultimate effacement.