СМЕХ В «МЕРТВЫХ ДУШАХ»
THE
LAUGHTER OF DEAD SOULS
What is laughter? How do we define laughter? What are the
most characteristic features of Gogol’s laughter? Here we come to the heart of
the writer’s narrative method, and we pose questions that are extremely
difficult to answer.
“Gogol had mastered the awesome power of laughter, a power
not having found such forceful expression ever before, in anyone else, nowhere,
not in any written literature since the world came into existence. After giving
expression to that laughter, Gogol died, starved himself to death, powerless to
create, or even precisely to define, the ideal that he would find himself able not
to laugh at” (Dostoevsky quoted, from an article written in 1861, cited in
Mann, V poiskakh . . ., p. 385).
“The central figure in Gogol’s work is laughter. It was
laughter that gave such brightness to Gogol’s name, the pure laughter that reached
its fullest expression in his play Revizor [The Inspector General] . . .
first staged on Apr. 19, 1836 . . .” (Richard Pevear introduction to
Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of DS). “‘Revizor is the high point of laughter
in Gogol’s work. Never either before or after Revizor have we laughed
like that!’” (Andrei Sinyavsky cited in Pevear introduction; see also V teni
Gogolja, p. 95). Unfortunately, telling us that Gogol’s laughter in The
Inspector General was “pure” doesn’t really tell us much; nor do we gain
much insight when Sinyavsky and Dostoevsky inform us that Gogol’s laughter
makes you laugh like you’ve never laughed before.
Laughter comes in many shapes and forms, and various types
of laughter are illustrated in DS. There is, e.g., the robust,
life-affirming, though vulgar and crude, laughter of Nozdryov (see below, when
we get back to treating Nozdryov in more detail). Then, there is this wonderful
illustration of sycophantic laughter (beginning of Ch. 8), which emerges as an
extended metaphor out of a description of the immense joy that Chichikov’s
arrival at the ball affords all the town’s high society.
“There was not a single face that did not express pleasure or,
at least, a reflection of the general pleasure. Just so do the faces of all the
bureaucrats light up when some high official arrives for an inspection of the
departments entrusted to them, after their initial fright has subsided and they
perceive that not a few things are to the liking of the great man. He himself
has at last condescended to jest a bit—that is, has uttered a few words with a
pleasant smile. Whereupon those bureaucrats clustered around him laugh in
response to his sally twice as hard as need be; those who, truth to tell, had
heard but poorly the bon mot he let drop, make up for that by laughing heartily
with all their might; and, finally, some policeman or other, stationed far off
near the door, at the very exit, who has never laughed in all his born days and
who only a moment before had brandished his fist at the crowd outside—why, even
he, in accordance with the immutable laws of reflection, gives expression on
his face to a smile of sorts, although that grin looks more like the paroxysm
of someone preparing to sneeze after a pinch of strong snuff.” A description of
sycophantic laughter, told in a crescendo of hyperbole—Gogol’s favorite
literary device—to the point of hilarity. Is this the pure laughter that Pevear
mentions? But then, if you look closely at this scene you’ll observe more than
a little “impurity.”
Then there is the kind of laughter that can be good-natured,
yet simultaneously cruel. A perfect example is the scene in Ch. 9, featuring,
once again, snuff, when a boy’s schoolmates stick a ‘dooby’—a piece of paper
rolled up with snuff inside—up his nose while he’s asleep, then laugh
uproariously at his waking reaction. Human laughter is frequently a boon
companion of cruelty or mockery. That’s a fact. But in none of the remarks that
Gogol makes in print about what laughter is do I find acknowledgement of that
basic truth. Here we have a scene of boys pulling a prank, having what many
would consider “good clean fun.” But it is only one step from this to a hideous
scene in Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, depicting teenage boys
laughing uproariously, even singing, while committing gang rape. Can laughter
accompany horrendous violence and brutality? Every day, all over the world, it
does.
In Ch. 2, preparing to depart from the Manilov estate,
Chichikov has nice things to say to Manilov’s boys. Promising to bring them
gifts when he comes again, he kisses one of them on the head, then turns “to
Manilov and his spouse with a slight chuckle, the sort of laugh that is always put
on for the benefit of parents, by way of letting them know how innocent are the
desires of their children.” Here we have the laughter used to assure
parents—even when you don’t believe it—what wonderful children they have. Can
laughter be hypocritical? All the time.
Gogol’s laughter came naturally; laughter was part of his
take on life, almost from the very beginning, when he played comic roles in
student productions in Ukraine. Laughter pervades much of his early fiction,
and he apparently never questioned, early on, the role of laughter in his fictional
works. His disposition had a melancholy bent, and at times he confessed that
one reason why he wrote comedy was to laugh himself out of his depression. When
he read certain chapters of his DS to selected audiences at the homes of
his friends—prior to the novel’s publication—he played the audience for laughs,
and got them; under the influence of his comic performance his listeners at
times were practically rolling on the floor and holding their sides. When he’s
not there to read aloud and perform the comedy for his readers he uses bizarre skaz
narrators to aim for a similar performative effect: to get his audience in
stitches.
Gogol’s views on laughter, however, changed in the latter
part of his writing career. He was taken aback, even devastated, by the uproar
over his most uproarious work, The Inspector General, when it was staged
in 1836. This play is, by far, the funniest, and the best, ever written in
Russian literature, but the way some people reacted to it—often with chagrin,
with a sense of outrage—scared Gogol stiff. “After The Inspector General
Gogol could no longer laugh,” writes Sinyavsky. He goes on to note that if we
scrutinize the figures frozen motionless in terror—in the famous dumbshow scene
that concludes the play—we may note that among them is the author himself. “The
laughter of The Inspector paralyzed him” (V teni Gogolja, p.
128).
The play features the same sort of small-town bureaucrats as
those featured in DS, and it portrays them the same way: as utterly
venal ludicrous dunces. Certain staid figures in upper-level Russian society
were unprepared to see themselves ridiculed like that. Their reaction to
Gogol’s great play should not have been surprising, given that probably never
before in Russian literature had anyone so laughed at, mocked, ridiculed, implicitly
criticized the pillars of Russian institutions. After the play was staged Gogol
fled abroad to escape the consequences. Apparently that was when he first began
asking himself hard questions about his own laughter, and about whether it was appropriate
for him to air out his laughter through the writing of comic fiction.
His reaction to stress was always flight—the same reaction
he gives to so many of his characters. He fled abroad and communed with his own
mind, later feeling the need to write lame justifications for his great play.
In his short dramatic piece relating to the staging of The Inspector General,
“Leaving the Theatre after the Performance of a New Comedy”—sometimes
translated as “After the Play” (1842)—Gogol writes, “It’s too bad nobody
noticed one honest person who does appear in my play. There is, in fact, an
honest, noble person who never leaves the stage over the course of the whole
play. His name is ‘Laughter’ . . . And not the laughter generated by temporary
irritability, by a bitter, morbid frame of mind, nor the frivolous laughter
that serves only for idle entertainment, but laughter that emerges from man’s bright
and better nature . . . without whose penetrating power the pettiness and
emptiness of life would not have appeared so frightening to man.” Here, as
elsewhere, Gogol speaks in platitudes. Just what, for example is this “laughter
that emerges from man’s bright and better nature”? He gives no precise examples
of what he is talking about, nor even an allusion to the disturbing fact that
laughter often wells up out of the guts of human beastliness.
Rambling on in “After the Play,” he goes on to assert, “No,
those who claim that laughter incites indignation are not correct. Only the
dark and sombre incites indignation, and laughter is bright.” Not necessarily
true, of course; laughter is often dark and often arouses plenty of indignation.
He continues, “illumined with the force of laughter it even brings
reconciliation into [man’s] soul.” Not necessarily true; laughter by no means
is always a force for reconciliation. Laughter can be divisive. Same text: “But
they don’t hear the mighty force of such laughter: ‘that which is funny is
base,’ says society. Only that pronounced in a severe and tense voice do they
call elevated.” Gogol proves over and over again with such attempts at
explaining himself that he has little idea what he is talking about.
In a letter to Pushkin (Oct. 7, 1835)—the first mention of DS
on paper—he promised the great poet that when he finished the novel it would be
hilarious. But looking back later on to his early conception of the novel (in
“An Author’s Confession,” 1847), he wrote as follows:
“I was going to begin writing without setting myself any
detailed plan, without having taken into account what, precisely, the hero
himself should be. I simply thought that the humorous project that Chichikov
undertakes would in itself lead me to varied personages and characters and that
the very desire to laugh, originating within me, would create a multitude of
comic phenomena, which I intended to blend with touching ones.” Here Gogol is obviously
describing what might be called his pre-megalomanic phase, when he had not yet
begun seriously questioning the role of humor and laughter in his works, had
not yet become terrified of his own laughter, and had not yet begun to conceive
of his novel as something so grandiose that it would turn the world up on its
ear.
It’s as if this early Gogol were just stating a known fact,
a given: I’m a comic writer, I write humorous scenes; that’s what I do. I
turn things over to my muse and let her run free. Sinyavsky (p.180-83) has
remarked tellingly that the literary process (for a writer of fiction) demands
releasing one’s muse from too conscious a concentration on the doings of one’s
muse. Once you start harnessing her, your muse begins behaving rebelliously,
like the freedom-loving shaft horse in Chichikov’s troika. Gogol’s muse figure,
by the way, was what he called his гений
(genij), a male, but that’s a different issue.
In that same document from 1847 Gogol describes his doubts:
“I saw that in my fictional works I was laughing in vain and to no purpose, without
knowing why myself. If one is to laugh, then it’s better to laugh powerfully,
and at something that is really worthy of universal ridicule.” Here he seems to
be suggesting that he should put his laughter in the service of satire, in
order to ridicule evil institutions and persons—but the idea is expressed only vaguely.
In various other published comments, subsequent to the
publication of DS in 1842, Gogol continues to mull over the role of humor
and laughter in his works. “The Denouement of The Inspector General”
(1846) is a short dramatic piece that Gogol apparently intended as a summing up
of the action of his great play. It concludes with a lengthy declamation by
“The First Comic Actor” (a part written for M.S. Shchepkin), who defends his
chosen profession: “Look at me; I’m crying! As a comic actor I used to make you
laugh, but now I’m crying. Allow me to feel that my calling too is just as
honorable as that of each of you [the other actors], that in the same way I
serve my country, as do all of you, that I’m not some sort of frivolous skomorokh
[folk marketplace clown] who produces cheap entertainment for empty-headed
people, but an honorable public servant of God’s great kingdom and that I have
aroused laughter in you—but not the aimless laughter with which one man mocks
another in society, which is engendered by the sloth and emptiness of idle
time, but laughter that is born out of a love for mankind.” Vague again. Just
exactly what kind of laughter emerges out of love for humanity? Hard to say. None
of Gogol’s assertions in articles and dramatic pieces cited above do much to
explain his particular use of laughter in his fictions. Rather, they
demonstrate that the author had only a superficial conception of what his
laughter was and how it worked. See below on one telling word here: skomorokh.
Already in the body of the text of DS, as he was
writing the first volume, Gogol had begun getting in the way of his genij
and questioning his use of laughter. Ch. 7 begins with a long lyrical
digression—treated in more detail below, in the section on digressions—in which,
among other things, Gogol goes proleptic, defending himself as a writer and
arguing in advance with his prospective readers. He speaks of the type of
writer who avoids describing “tedious and repulsive” characters and the sleaze in
which they are mired. That writer, rather, concentrates on images that are
elevated and remote from the earth. “All and sundry, with much clapping of
hands, hasten after him and rush headlong in the wake of his triumphant
chariot.”
Much different is the lot and destiny of the writer who
reveals “all that fearsome, overwhelming, slimy morass of minutiae that have
bogged down our lives.” This sort of writer, who is himself—Gogol never comes
out and says this, but it is obvious—will not receive “the plaudits of the
populace” or “the responsive tears and unanimous rapture of the souls he has
stirred.” He will be assigned “an ignoble place in the ranks of those writers
who have affronted humanity,” and readers “will ascribe to him the [lowly]
qualities of the heroes he himself has depicted.”
Next he goes on to consider the humor in his “poem” and the
reader’s prospective inimical reaction to it. “For the judgment of his times
does not recognize that lofty, rapturous laughter is worthy of taking its place
side by side with a lofty, lyrical strain and that there is a very abyss
between that laughter and the tortured posturings of a showbooth scaramouch! [skomorokh]”
Here we must cite the original Russian, as this passage is vital, and
translators have rendered it in a variety of ways: “ibo ne priznaet sovremennyj
sud, chto vysokij vostorzhennyj smekh dostoin stat’ rjadom s vysokim
liricheskim dvizhen’em i chto tselaja propast’ mezhdu nim i krivljan’jami
balagannogo skomorokha.”
So here we have Gogol, apparently, making some clear
distinctions, or trying to. There is this “lofty rapturous laughter,” a
positive way of laughing that, so he implies, is characteristic of his DS.
This is apparently the same “laughter born out of a love for mankind” that is
cited above from “The Denouement of The Inspector General, where the
same word, skomorokh, is used disparagingly—in reference to the lowly,
often scatological folk laughter of the marketplace. B.G. Guerney makes a
valiant attempt at translating the end of this passage, as "showbooth
scaramouch,” but maybe the best we can do in English is “marketplace clown.” At
any rate, there are two words here that need defining: balagan and skomorokh.
Let us consult the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary:
balagan: (1) a theatrical performance, usually of a
comic nature, at fairs and folk festivities (in Russia from the middle of the
18th Century); (2) (metaphorically speaking) something not serious,
clownish, crudely vulgar.
skomorokhi (pl.): itinerant folk entertainers in
Ancient Russia, putting on performances as singers, witty raconteurs,
musicians, stagers of brief farcical plays, animal trainers, acrobats. Known
from the eleventh century on, and especially prevalent from the 15th
to the 17th centuries. Often repressed by church and civil
authorities.
The best illustration of the performance of a skomorokh
appears perhaps in Tarkovsky’s famous film from 1966, Andrei Rublyov
(set in the early 15th century). Here the actor Rolan Bykov plays a skomorokh
who puts on a vulgar show—including his mooning of the audience—in a lowly
drinking establishment. He is arrested by soldiers, beaten up and taken off to
prison. Long before Gogol’s time the laughter of the balagan and the skomorokh
were widely denigrated as base, scatological, indecent. Maybe most importantly
of all, the skomorokhi had strong ties to ancient pagan religions; the
Russian Orthodox Church considered them minions of the devil.
Here we have slipped over into the purview of Mikhail
Bakhtin and his fascinating book on Rabelais, on the laughter of carnival and
the medieval marketplace. For English language readers this book has been translated
by Helen Iswolsky as Rabelais and His World. In his book Bakhtin redeems
the sort of humor long condemned by civilized society and the Christian church.
As for the laughter of Gogol, Bakhtin takes a stab—in a section from his
doctoral dissertation, not included in his book on Rabelais—at accommodating
Gogol’s humor to his theories about carnival laughter. Translated into English,
this article—“Verbal Art and the Folk
Culture of Laughter”—appears in the Norton Critical Edition of DS (p. 569-577).
A few quotations:
“A careful analysis would reveal the basis of Dead Souls
to be the forms of a merry (carnival) journey through the underworld, through
the land of death . . . Gogol was profoundly aware of the philosophical and
universal nature of his laughter, yet at the same time could find nothing
similar, no theoretical substantiation for or illumination of such laughter
under the conditions of ‘serious’ nineteenth century culture. When discussing
the reasons for his laughter he obviously did not dare reveal fully its nature,
its all-encompassing folk character. He often justified his laughter by the
limited morality of his time.”
Bakhtin suggests that Gogol was totally aware of the
profundity of his laughter, but did not dare explain himself in print. I doubt
it. Gogol—as I’ve illustrated above—was almost utterly in the dark when it came
to the philosophical and universal implications of his laughter. When he
undertook to explain what the laughter in his fictional works amounted to, he
did little but voice lofty rhetorical platitudes that explain nothing. Although
some of Gogol’s laughter is Rabelaisian, he had not, of course, read Bakhtin’s
book on Rabelais and the profound implications of lowly, bawdy laughter, the
laughter of the balagan and the skomorokhi. The citation from DS
above makes it clear that he—extremely religious throughout his life—stood
firmly with the Russian Orthodox Church in its battle with the lowly pagan humor
of skomoroshestvo. He certainly could have no inkling of how well his own
humor fit into Bakhtin’s schema, and the Dionysian implications of his laughter
would have terrified him.
Bakhtin finds profundity in the very freedom of base,
scatological laughter, carnival laughter. Intuitively, so does Gogol, but,
religious conservative that he is, he never dares to reveal that truth even to
himself. Denigrators of laughter denigrate lowly folk laughter, while [citing
Bakhtin], “the trampled rights of laughter find their [intuitive, URB] defender
and spokesman in him, Gogol, although all his life he thought about serious,
tragic and moralistic literature.”
“One could say that his inner nature led him to laugh ‘like
the gods’ [the kind of laughter that, according to Bakhtin, is amoral and
beyond the constraints of morality]—but that he felt it necessary to justify
his laughter with the limited human morality of his time.” Exactly. Gogol never
figured out the profundity of his laughing world, “the world where all is funny
and nonserious, where only laughter is taken seriously.”
The big secret that Gogol never allowed himself to learn: despite
its author’s perennial self-imprisonment in the oubliette of religiosity, the
humor of DS, and practically everything else he wrote in fiction, has
affinity with the wild and pagan humor of the marketplace. Bakhtin: “The
mocking satirist is never merry. At best he is sullen and gloomy. But for Gogol
laughter conquers all; in particular, he creates a certain catharsis of
vulgarity.” Aha. Exactly. This brings us back to the issue of irony vs. satire.
We recall that the kind of humor in DS is, largely, that of the light
and ironic touch, learned, primarily, from Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin. Such
humor is typical of the aristocratic wit, of rationalism and the
intellectualism of the Enlightenment—see my introduction above, the treatment
of the Richards article.
At first glance that aristocratic humor would appear to have
little in common with Bakhtin’s lowly humor of the marketplace and carnival.
But there are points at which the two meet. Both kinds of humor are, largely, irreverent.
Both denigrate glum and morose solemnity and hold up nearly all truths to
question. Both fight against the restraints of organized religion and
governmental oppression. Both insist that laughing boisterously,
effervescently, may be the most important thing that anyone on earth can do.
Most of the laughter in DS laughs like that, and that’s what makes DS
a classic in comedy writing: one of the best comic novels ever written in world
literature. Sad to say, Gogol never allowed himself to know how profound his
laughter was, how it worked and what it did. He could not embrace the
brilliance of his laughing world, he feared the uproarious joy, and he would
die not having a clue about how wondrous his laughter was/is.
Of course, to some extent Gogol was right to resist the
unrestraint and surrender to the base vulgarity that folk laughter represents.
The big weakness of Bakhtin’s book lies in the way he glorifies the Dionysian
and downplays the Apollonian. But since the beginning of human history man has
struggled to go the Apollonian way—exalting his reason and civil
institutions—by way of resisting the descent into beastliness that the
Dionysian way always implies.
d
Here’s a different issue, but an important one. Critics have
often commented on the complexity of humor, the comic, laughter in Gogol’s
works. Andrei Bely, for one, expresses even a bias against treatment of the
issue. “Too much, in my opinion, is said about Gogolian ‘humor,’ about which
nothing substantial is effectively revealed . . . The notorious ‘humor,’ which
is contaminated by bewilderment, terror, tears, and the grotesque, is also not
humor in the strict sense” (Gogol’s Artistry, p. 47). In his lengthy treatment
of “A Terrible Vengeance,” Bely takes one of his frequent digs at the critic
Iosif D. Mandelstam, who “has devoted half of his study” [published in 1902] to
Gogol’s ‘humor.’” Bely reveals himself to be no big fan of what he calls “the
twisted humor” in Gogol’s Ukrainian tales. “Gogol’s heavy-hearted laughter is
brought on by pangs of melancholy. The ‘Ukrainian’ Gogol is a gloomy grotesque,
deafened by guffaws in which there are no ‘invisible’ tears whatsoever. I
cannot call it ‘humor’; nor is ‘satire’ the right word. Gogol is no satirist”
(Ibid, p. 85).
One more quote from Bely: “Petersburg shattered Gogol. He
clutched onto irony as a means of self-defense. Yet what predominates is not
laughter, but fear . . . Laughter itself becomes an expression of terror
reminiscent of the sorcerer from “A Terrible Vengeance.’ Here for the first
time the roots of Gogolian laughter are exposed, laughter that even in Evenings
[on a Farm Near Dikanka] possessed sinister undertones . . . Laughter
merely echoes all kinds of unpleasantness lurking behind it . . . From his very
first stories some forgotten [repressed? URB], terrible experience weighs upon
Gogol’s protagonists. And laughter only casts the black shadow of this
experience more sharply. It is like a hole burned through the sky, like a hole
in the day itself” (p. 228).
Bely (p. 229-30) is particularly good on the “unbridled
groundless fear” that underpins so many of Gogol’s fictional works. He is by
far not the only critic to emphasize how Gogol’s humor is pervaded with fear, and
how one laughing through fear laughs a hollow tainted laughter. In Chapter Nine
of his scholarly work (“The Gogolian Universe: Notes Toward a Theory”) Donald
Fanger, citing Lotman, brings up this issue again, in light of the ancient tradition
in Russian Orthodoxy to see laughter as the devil’s work: “Gogolian laughter is
never far from fear, if not horror” (The Creation of Nikolai Gogol,
footnote on p. 231). Tellingly, in terms of Gogol, Bakhtin notes how Romantic
grotesque (Gogol’s métier) is permeated with terror (Rabelais and His World,
p. 38-43). Andrei Sinyavsky asserts a paradoxical fact about the way Gogol’s
works blend fear with hilarity: “He who more than any other frightened us,
tyrannized over us, also was the one who more than any other made us laugh. We
have no other author more scary and nightmarish than Gogol; we have no other
writer who also so forced Russia to laugh” (V teni Gogolja, p.90).
A few more remarks about Sinyavsky’s insightful take on
Gogol’s laughter are worth citing. Gogol’s life and works, writes Sinyavsky,
whirl in a perpetual cyclic movement, with anguish devolving into laughter
devolving into anguish. “And which comes first, which is primary, the unbounded
merriment, the risibility of Gogol’s nature or the thing no less a boon
companion of his soul: melancholy?” (p. 90). Chapter Two of Sinyavsky’s book,
on The Inspector General, contains some of the best criticism written about
Gogol’s fiction. The critic notes that there’s not the shade of a decent person
amidst the characters of the play, no reason not to feel utter misery over the
profusion of immorality that pervades the Russia depicted. And yet we are
caught up in a hearty gut laughter, and we laugh like never before or since (p.
94-95).
At performances of the play the mayor accosts the laughing
audience at the end: “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves!”
But all the same the audience goes on laughing, and that moment reveals
something profound in human nature. “Nonetheless we go on laughing: it’s funny!
We laugh and we are as if evaporating, whirling about, disappearing, flying
like a troika . . . And in a kind of ecstasy, liberation, rapture, in the
sweetest of dreams it finds its echo in our souls, that iridescent laughter”
(p.101). Sinyavsky suggests that in a way Gogol was right when he later wrote
that the play contains “one honorable and noble personage: laughter.” Here “one may add that this is the only real
character in the comedy, in which the other characters are phantoms, and for
that reason it, the laughter is bright, and light on its feet, and kind, the
laughter that signifies the repletion of existence and the absolute absence of
evil. It, the laughter, has no quarrel with anyone, has no need to educate anyone,
to eradicate anything, that silver-toned laughter of The Inspector General”
(p. 142-43).
Elvis Presley got everything he wanted in life and then died
of the getting of it. Nikolai Gogol wrote a play in which laughter attained to
a kind of miraculous apotheosis of the human spirit, then died having achieved
that apotheosis. Scared stiff of what some wondrous neuron in his soul had done
for him. Sinyavsky asserts that all the way through The Inspector
laughter is in the ascendency, but, as the action of Dead Souls
progresses, there is less and less of the laughter as we go. By the end of
Volume One, the only real volume of DS, the laughter was dead, dried up
on the pages of the novel. The critic adds that with the desiccation of
laughter in Gogol’s fiction went a concomitant dying out of any ability to feel
love.
The stern fundamentalist preacher in Gogol for the last ten
years of life, when his soul was afflicted with a kind of cancer, proved unable
to love even his nearest and dearest, his relatives back in Ukraine. “Amidst
the many documents written by humanity none are more hideous that Gogol’s
letters to his mother and sisters, who adored him” (p. 265). These letters are
characterized, most prominently, by the refusal to express any love. At the
point where the laughter had gone totally desiccate, writes Sinyavsky, it
degenerated into one more of Gogol’s poses of dumbshow, like a person who
screws up his face in preparation for a sneeze, but then ends up not sneezing,
in a frozen paroxysm of un-sneezery (p. 274). Note the leitmotif of un-sneezery
in DS, a novel in which the name of the main character sneezes every
time it’s pronounced: CHEE-chee-cuff! See above in this section: (1) the
policeman in Ch. 8, who never laughs in his whole lifetime, but who puts on a
grin that resembles the initiation of a sneeze, then never gets around to the
sneeze; (2) the boy with the “dooby” of snuff stuck up his nose in Ch. 9, who
wakes up befuddled, looks around at his laughing classmates, but never gets
around to sneezing.
While I appreciate Sinyavsky’s many insights into Gogol’s
life and works, I believe that his emphasis on the desiccation of laughter in DS
is somewhat exaggerated. Let us return briefly here to Huizinga’s ideas on the
importance of the play spirit in great comic fiction. One could view Gogol at
his best in comedy writing as the supreme player artist, aloft on his own
inspiration. This is the figure close to the archaic poet whom Huizinga (Homo
Ludens, p. 120) designates as vates, “the possessed, the God-smitten,
the raving one.” Huizinga emphasizes repeatedly that the workings of the
creative imagination are the workings of a mind and spirit at play. “Poetry, in
its original culture-making capacity, is born in and as play—sacred play no
doubt, but always, even in its sanctity, verging on gay abandon, mirth and
jollity” (p. 122). Gogol is closest to the gods when he romps around
skomorokh-style, when he lets loose and soars in extended riffs of hilarity—riffs
not totally Dionysian nor Apollonian, rifts that find a nice balance between
the two. Chapter Nine of DS, in which rumors about Chichikov’s dead
souls rise up on huge billows of crescendos, ever higher and higher as we go,
ever more hilarious, proves that Gogol’s laughter at this point was still far
from desiccate. We witness here light, airy, wonderful comic writing, sublime
cachinnation, “like sprightly Spring that laugheth into leaf” (from the poem
“Sing Me At Dawn,” by Wilfred Owen).
Sinyavsky is good on his treatment of Khlestakov, the main
protagonist of The Inspector General and a liar of genius. “Having no
desire whatsoever to dupe or swindle anyone, he himself forgets [caught up in
his very words that soar] that he is lying . . . that’s certainly the best and
most poetic moment in his life—almost a sort of inspiration” (Sinyavsky, p.
151-52, who cites Gogol describing his character): “It is not Khlestakov who
controls the words he uses; it is rather the words themselves that lead the
character on. He clutches at the first words that occur to him, and they carry
him off only God knows where. In Khlestakov we are shown the exemplar of the
creative process” (p. 153). “If in Gogol’s creative works laughter and ecstasy
often go hand in hand, then in the final monologue of Khlestakov we have some
sort of ecstasy of laughter, laughter in its purest form, to which the
soul attends and is led to seek the lofty and sublime” (p. 154). Well put.
In sum, Khlestakov is the great artist-player of Gogol’s
great play, the one who “craves a perpetual ball and carnival.” But in his
enthusiasm for this wonderful personage, Sinyavsky seems to forget that he has
a twin brother in Gogol’s great novel; that brother is Nozdryov. Much that
Sinyavsky has to say about Khlestakov is equally applicable to him, and as long
as Nozdryov is in DS we have no fear of the laughter going desiccate.
Where I differ, obviously, with those who emphasize the
fearful nature of Gogol’s laughter—the something sinister about it—is in my
evaluation of the laughter of Dead Souls. True, many of the comic scenes
near the end of the book have their origin in fear. But this is the fear of the
book’s venal characters, the townspeople and city fathers of N, who are
flabbergasted by the issue of dead souls. The reader, I would assert, is more
likely to laugh lightly and joyously at the hilarious crescendo of comedy that
develops out of the plight of those venal personages. The same thing happens—I
would contend—when one is a spectator at a well-staged presentation of The
Inspector General. The characters may be fearful; they end up scared stiff
in the final scene. But even when the mayor accuses the audience of “laughing
at themselves,” they go on laughing a joyous gut laughter that overwhelms any
feelings of guilt. Then, take the listeners at Gogol’s presentations of
readings of his novel—those people rolling on the ground with merriment as he
acted out the scenes—they certainly were not laughing fearfully. They, once
again, were laughing the liberating gut laughter of joy. My contention,
therefore, is that this is the kind of laughter that the reader of DS
should be laughing as well. Where would it fit in Vladimir Propp’s book about
laughter? Maybe best in Chapter 23: “The Laughter of Joyous Life” (Жизнерадостный смех). This, perhaps is what Pevear
had in mind when he spoke of Gogol’s “pure” laughter, what Sinyavsky had in
mind when he waxed eloquent over the “silver-toned, iridescent” laughter of The
Inspector General.
With Gogol the most important word—in regard to his
fictional works and to his own personal life—was always душа, soul. Here is the constant
refrain from his letters (paraphrase): “I must purify my own soul, and only
then can I write cogently about the purification of all the souls of my fellow countrymen.”
Little did he realize that his soul perhaps manifested itself at its purest in
the fictional passages where inspired laughter laughed at its most uproarious.
Summing up, as far as I know, the book about Gogol’s laughter
and how it fits into the culture of a thousand years of Russian history has
still not been written. There remains much to be discussed. Worth pointing out here
is that some of the most renowned Russian scholars of the twentieth century—Bakhtin,
Likhachev, Propp, Lotman—have published insightful materials on the issue of
laughter. A seminal work is that of D.S. Likhachev and A.M. Pashchenko, «Смеховой мир» древней Руси (The “Laughing World” of
Ancient Russia), Leningrad: Nauka, 1976. See also Ju. M. Lotman, “Gogol’ i
sootnoshenie ‘smekhovoj kul’tury’ s komicheskim i ser’eznym v russkoj
natsional’noj traditsii,” (“Gogol and the Correlation of ‘Laughing Culture’
with the Comic and the Serious in the Russian National Tradition”), Tartu
University, 1974, and Vladimir Propp’s posthumously published Problemy
komizma i smekha (Moscow, 1976).
