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Translation of Poem by Olga Tabachnikova, Ольга Табачникова, "Полночный город прошивают молнии," GOLDEN THREADS

 

Ольга Табачникова
 
Olga Tabachnikova
(born 1967)
 
Полночный город прошивают молнии.
Грохочет тьма.
Внезапною слезою переполнены,
Дрожат дома.
 
А небо переполнено открытьями
С нездешней высоты.
Всё чёрное, но с золотыми нитями.
Как жизнь моя. Как ты.
 
Май 2016

[from the poetry collection titled Половинка яблока (Apple Sliced in Half)]

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                                       Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

                                    

                                   Golden Threads
 
Lightning flares sew up in stiches the city’s wee hours.
Darkness juddering rumbles.
Caught up in a flurry of tears as the midnight sky glowers,
Are buildings shuddering, humbled.
 
The heavens are teeming with marvels profound and abstruse,
Sent to us from on high.
All is black, but laced through with threads gold and profuse,
Like the lives that we live, you and I.
 

Translation of Poem by Andrei Bely, Андрей Белый, "Пепел. Россия. Отчаянье." ASHES. RUSSIA. DESPAIR.

                                             Portrait of Andrei Bely by Leon Bakst, 1905

Андрей Белый

 

Andrei Bely
(1880-1934)

 

Пепел. Россия. Отчаянье.

Довольно: не жди, не надейся —
Рассейся, мой бедный народ!
В пространство пади и разбейся
За годом мучительный год!

Века нищеты и безволья.
Позволь же, о родина-мать,
В сырое, в пустое раздолье,
В раздолье твое прорыдать:

Туда, на равнине горбатой, -
Где стая зеленых дубов
Волнуется купой подъятой
В косматый свинец облаков,

Где по полю Оторопь рыщет,
Восстав сухоруким кустом,
И в ветер пронзительно свищет
Ветвистым своим лоскутом,

Где в душу мне смотрят из ночи,
Поднявшись над сетью бугров,
Жестокие, желтые очи
Безумных твоих кабаков, -

Туда, где смертей и болезней
Лихая прошла колея, -
Исчезни в пространстве, исчезни,
Россия, Россия моя!

1908 г.

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                                             Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 
                 Ashes. Russia. Despair.

Enough: no more waiting, stop hoping;
Disperse into ether, my poor native folk!
Year after year with the grief never coping,
Shatter in bits and dissolve into smoke.
 
Ages and ages of poverty, slavery,
O, Motherland, black earth misprized, 
Your dampness, your broad void, your knavery,
In your vast empty space let me cry out my eyes!
 
Let me go to some humped level flatland,
Where a gaggle of oaks in a dreamscape 
Stirs as it stretches green crowns and boughs grand
Neath a hirsute and leaden cloudscape,
 
Where Sheer Trepidation rampages
Through fields of bare bushes and brambles,
While the shrill-whistling wind blows and rages
Through the shreds of quotidian shambles,
 
Where hovering over the hills never-ending,
Deep into my soul they peer out of the night,
Those yellowish eyes of the cruel, unrelenting,
Who thrive in the madness of low taverns’ blight,
 
Where the rumbustious train of diseases and dying
Has roared past and left in its wake naught but woe,
Disperse into pure space, dissolve, skip the sighing,
My Motherland Rus, evanesce now—just go!
 

 

Translation of Poem by Olga Tabachnikova, Ольга Табачникова, "Навеки достоевская страна," WHERE DOSTOEVSKY REIGNS

Ольга Табачникова

Olga Tabachnikova
(born 1967)

 

Навеки достоевская страна.
Закованные в лёд слепые реки,
Как до поры опущенные веки.
И безрассудством пьяная весна.

 

Здесь возвращают Господу билет,
Здесь бьются лбом в безумьи и в поклоне.
Здесь Бог и сатана в одном флаконе.
И испокон  – семь бед, один ответ.

 Апрель 2013

[from the poetry collection titled Половинка яблока (Apple Sliced in Half)]

 

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Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

 

                                                              Where Dostoevsky Reigns
 
Our country—Dostoevsky’s realm—
now and evermore.
Ice-bound rivers’ blind
and swaddled plea, 
the drooping eyelids
of the ogre Viy,
and spring dead drunk
on insolence
and cheek galore.
 
Here you give your entry ticket
back to God.
Here you bow and bang your forehead
hard on flagstone floors.
Here the Devil and the Lord
wear the same ripped drawers.
 
And from time immemorial,
time out of mind,
the same song’s sung
by the same poor sod:
 
“Bad luck’s a given; why try to fight it?
Your elbow’s near, but you can’t bite it.”  

 

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Biographical Information

(from the website for University of Central Lancashire)

Dr. Olga Tabachnikova teaches Slavonic Studies, which runs an extensive programme of academic and cultural activities. Olga’s main area of expertise is Russian literature and cultural history from the 19th century to the present. She is a prolific researcher, collaborating in numerous international projects, and an award-winning poet, with two books of poetry (in Russian). She is also the lead for ‘Representations of Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Media, Literature and Art’ (MIDEX Centre, UCLan).

Olga has published widely in the field of Russian Studies, including Literature, Philosophy and Film Studies, as well as Identity and Gender Studies. She edited and co-edited collective volumes on Russian Irrationalism, the Russian Jewish Diaspora, and Russian literature and philosophy. Her latest monograph with Bloomsbury Academic, published both as hardcover (2015) and paperback (2016) editions, is dedicated to Russian irrationalism in a historical perspective. Olga has organised and co-organised numerous international conferences, including that on Russian cultural continuity, in 2016, and on Russian-British Intercultural Dialogue in the framework of the Russian-British Year of Music 2019. Her activities as the Director of the Vladimir Vysotsky Centre for Slavonic Studies involved hosting a large number of distinguished visitors, including Belorussian nuns from the St Elisabeth convent near Minsk, who gave a Russian Orthodox painting workshop in 2018. You can see a brief TV coverage of the event here. Being an expert on Russia Abroad, Olga is also the Lead for the ‘Representations of Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Media, Literature and Art’ research strand within the UCLan Research Centre for Migration, Diaspora and Exile (MIDEX).

 

Beat Some Sense Into Me!

 

At Oxford University, sometime back in the Time Beyond Recall, the conferring of the degree of Master of Grammar was accompanied by presentation of a birch rod as symbol of office, and by the ceremonial flogging of a whipping-boy with that rod by the new Master.
 
                                                                             Ferula

A ferula, or ferule, is a flat piece of wood that expanded at the end into something pear-shaped with a hole in the middle; it was used to strike the hand or mouth, raising a horrible blister. Aren’t we homosapiens highly creative in the ways we find to be vicious to each other?
 
                                                                          Original Sin
 
Locke: believed the child to be a tabula rasa, upon which society imprints its image.
Rousseau: believed a child is born naturally good.
Original Sin: holds that a child is born evil and must have the evil socialized out (or beaten out) of him.
 

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]

Poem by Bobby Goosey, "Revenge"

 

Bobby Lee Goosey

                                Revenge

You done bunfungered me,
I’m all bunfungered;
WhatemIgoando? Huh?
Don’t know what to do.
 
You done gongoozled me,
I’m all gongoozled;
WhatemIgoando? Huh?
Don’t know what to do.
 
You done dooverwockied me,
I’m all dooverwockied;
WhatemIgoando? Huh?
Don’t know what to do.
 
I’m all bunfungered and
I’m plumb gongoozled and
I’m dooverwackywockied . . . and
You know whatI’mgoando?
 
I’m gonna ferrikakadouzer,
Gonna plumb gongoozle,
Gonna dooverwockywacky
On your dumb fat noodle,
 
Gonna done bunfunger,
Gonna plumb gongoozle,
Gonna dooverwackywock
All over you! That’s right!
Gonna dooverwackywock all over you!

Translation of Poem by Joseph Brodsky, "Август," AUGUST

Joseph Brodsky

(1940-1996)

Август

Маленькие города, где вам не скажут правду.
Да и зачем вам она, ведь всё равно — вчера.
Вязы шуршат за окном, поддакивая ландшафту,
известному только поезду. Где-то гудит пчела.

Сделав себе карьеру из перепутья, витязь
сам теперь светофор; плюс, впереди — река,
и разница между зеркалом, в которое вы глядитесь,
и теми, кто вас не помнит, тоже невелика.

 

Запертые в жару, ставни увиты сплетнею
или просто плющом, чтоб не попасть впросак.
Загорелый подросток, выбежавший в переднюю,
у вас отбирает будущее, стоя в одних трусах.

Поэтому долго смеркается. Вечер обычно отлит
в форму вокзальной площади, со статуей и т. п.,
где взгляд, в котором читается «Будь ты проклят»,
прямо пропорционален отсутствующей толпе.

 1996

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Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

 August

The small towns where the truth

you won’t be told.

But why do you need truth,

when all is now of yesterday?

Outside the window rustling elms,

concurring in a landscape bold

known only to the trains; a bee

somewhere is buzzing in dismay.

The knight-errant discovered a career

composed of taking forks in distant pathways;

but now he’s made himself into

a traffic light, plus which,

there’s a river up ahead, and the

difference between the malaise

of your reflection in a mirror

and those who misconstrue you

amounts to but a twitch.

Locked tight in searing heat,

the shutters are wreathed in scuttlebutt,

or is it simply ivy,

to camouflage their asininity?

A suntanned kid,

dressed in drawers and tight crew cut,

comes rushing into anteroom,

to take away

your future expeditiously.

 

That’s why the dark is so slow coming on;

the evening is usually depicted bereft,

in the shape of a railway station square,

with statute and so on, etc.,

where the look that you get,

which reads, “Go get effed,”

is directly proportional

to the crowd that’s not there.

 

d

 

Translator’s Note

 

This poem is not distinctive or noteworthy, except for being, apparently, the last poem Brodsky wrote in his lifetime. I can’t really make much of the imagery, can’t tell you even vaguely what the poem is “about.” Most likely, it’s about nothing in particular. I wonder why in January he wrote a poem titled “August.” And I wonder if the suntanned adolescent, wearing only underpants, who comes and “takes away your future,” is the image of Death, on its way to take Joseph Brodsky—who lived out not even one complete month in the year the poem is dated, 1996. But since I’m far from an expert on Brodsky, I should probably leave interpretation of this poem to those who know his works much better than I do.

 On a personal note: Joseph Brodsky and I were born only a month apart, he on May 24, 1940, and I on June 25, 1940. I find it astonishing that I have now outlived him by almost thirty years. I used to wonder why his health seemed to be so bad, even when he was still a young man. Then it dawned on me that he was a child born directly into the horrendous Leningrad Siege of WW II, and he probably lived his first few years seriously malnourished.

 I met Brodsky only once in my life, when I was a young professor teaching Russian language, literature, and culture at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. Cannot remember the exact date, but I think this would have been the spring of 1973. Brodsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. The Russian professor (University of Michigan) and publicist Carl Proffer took him under his wing, and at the time of his visit to Oxford, he was living in Ann Arbor. We had invited him to make a talk at our university, and he and Proffer drove down to Ohio together. 

 Someone had arranged a reception for Brodsky, to which a variety of Miami professors were invited to meet him. The reception, including food and drink, took place in a beautiful outdoor setting in late spring, at the home of English prof Bill Pratt. I was among the only three or four Russian-speaking profs to attend. When I arrived at the reception, Proffer and Brodsky were already there, but things were not going well. Proffer stood and made small talk at the table with all the food, but Brodsky—who clearly did not wish to be there and had zero interest in meeting Miami profs—wandered alone in the distance, at the edge of the woods. He was obviously in a state of very bad nerves.

 When he finally came back to where we all awaited him, several of us who could speak Russian approached him. He did not much care to be approached. I ended up in a very brief conversation with him, which consisted of three words spoken by me and one word in reply by him. Not really knowing how to begin I introduced myself, saying, “Я переводчик Бунина (I’m a translator of Bunin).” He answered this statement—which apparently irritated him mightily—with one loud and highly sarcastic word, “Поздравляю! (Congratulations!).” So ended my conversation with Brodsky the one time I met him.

 Someone may ask me some time, “Have you ever had a conversation with a Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in which a different winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (also, incidentally, a Russian) was mentioned? My answer will be, “Yes, indeed, I did once have exactly such a conversation.” If someone asks, “Have you ever, by any chance, been congratulated by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” I can honestly answer, “Yes, I was once congratulated by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.” But since no one is aware of what interesting answers I have to those questions, no one will ever ask me.

 

Translation of Poem by Bella Akhmadulina, БЕЛЛА АХМАДУЛИНА, "Август," AUGUST

 

БЕЛЛА АХМАДУЛИНА
(1937-2010)
 
                               Август

Так щедро август звёзды расточал.
Он так бездумно приступал к владенью,
и обращались лица ростовчан
и всех южан — навстречу их паденью.
 
Я добрую благодарю судьбу.
Так падали мне на плечи созвездья,
как падают в заброшенном саду
сирени неопрятные соцветья.
 
Подолгу наблюдали мы закат,
соседей наших клавиши сердили,
к старинному роялю музыкант
склонял свои печальные седины.
 
Мы были звуки музыки одной.
О, можно было инструмент расстроить,
но твоего созвучия со мной
нельзя было нарушить и расторгнуть.
 
В ту осень так горели маяки,
так недалёко звёзды пролегали,
бульварами шагали моряки,
и девушки в косынках пробегали.
 
Всё то же там паденье звёзд и зной,
всё так же побережье неизменно.
Лишь выпали из музыки одной
две ноты, взятые одновременно.
 
1958
 
                d
 
                                  Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
 

                                August

So lavishly did August squander his stars.
Insouciantly to the throne he ascended;
the faces of Rostov and southern cities afar
looked to the skies—anointing the stellar-falls splendid.
 
So grateful am I to kind fate for my luck,
for whole constellations fell lush on my shoulders,
the way tiny floscules of lilac dumbstruck
in a desolate garden fall over stark boulders.
 
For long the sunset we’d observed—prolonged gleaming—
all peeved and sore-vexed by the keyboard next door,
where over piano (an old Bechstein) leaning
an artiste bent his sad, furrowed brow of gray-hoar.
 
Back then you and I were soul-sounds of pure music;
so what if that instrument played out of tune?
The accord and sheer consonance of us two effusive
was such as could not be annulled or impugned.
 
So brightly burned the lighthouses that fall,
and scintillating stars seemed almost at our doorstep;
the boulevards proliferated with the sailors’ sprawl,
and girls in headscarves danced a brisk light quickstep.  
 
And now it’s all the same there: falling stars
and heat, the beach and sandgrains miscellaneous.
But that scene’s sheet music is missing measures, bars: 
two notes that once played soft and simultaneous.
 

 

On Gogol's "Dead Souls": СКАЗИФИКАЦИИ (SKAZIFICATIONS)

 

СКАЗИФИКАЦИИ
(SKAZIFICATIONS)

Skaz. It’s high time we went into more detail about the narration and the narrators of Dead Souls. Skaz narration is at the heart of almost all of Gogol’s fictions. In a wide variety of his works Gogol uses a skaz narrator, or a series of skaz narrators. The best, and most famous example of skaz narration is his immortal story “The Overcoat,” and the best critical explanation of skaz in that story belongs to Boris Eichenbaum (see above).

In discussing this sort of narrative, the American critic Donald Fanger treats a different Gogol story, “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” which features an underclass and dunderheaded narrator named Rudy Panko. Here’s Rudy’s typical line of blather: “Ivan Ivanovich has the unusual gift of talking in a most extraordinary pleasant way. Lord, how he can talk! The only sensation you can compare with it is when somebody’s hunting for lice on your scalp or running a finger lightly over your heel. You listen and listen to him talk—and you just hang your head. It feels good! Just really nice! Like a nap after taking a bath.” Here’s Fanger: “What this underlines is the self-sufficient, almost sensual esthetic value of skillful discourse, quite independent of its content: the principal value of the story itself. Here, to use the Russian formalist term, is a masterpiece of skaz—a monologue in the guise of a narration: colloquial, individuated, free from the constraints of consistency in point of view, permeated with a paradoxical lyricism and an irony that ranges from blatant to enigmatic—but written, and serving literary ends” (Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 102-03).

When critics speak of skaz in DS, they cite, most frequently, the postmaster’s “Tale of Captain Kopeikin” in Ch. 10. Fanger again: “The matter of DS is so difficult to handle because it is so peculiarly, materially verbal. The interpolated ‘Tale of Captain Kopeikin’ offers an extended and crucial example. A masterpiece of skaz (mannered narration in which the speaker unwittingly vies with his story for attention and vivid manner overshadows ostensible matter), it consists largely of fillers, malapropisms and colorfully misdirected hyperbole.” There, parenthetically, is Fanger’s definition of skaz. Here is Victor Erlich’s (p. 146): “the mimicry of intonational, lexical, and phraseological mannerisms of a lowbrow narrator . . . enacts and parodies the pattern of a bumbling, chatty oral narration.”

“‘After the campaign of 1812, my dear sir’—(thus did the postmaster begin, despite the fact that the room held not one sir but all of six sirs)—‘after the campaign of 1812, a certain Captain Kopeikin was demobilized back from the front along with other wounded men. Whether it was at Krasnoe or at Leipzig, the fact remains that he had, if you can fancy such a thing, an arm and a, like, leg blown off.  Well then, at that time none of these, you know like, special provisions regarding the wounded had yet been made, none whatsoever; any sort of a fund for, like, you know, invalided soldiers, as you may imagine, was yet to be established, in some sort of way, some such as that, only considerably, like, later.’

Fanger: “The postmaster’s purpose in telling the story is to suggest [improbably, ironically, outlandishly, URB] that Chichikov is really Captain Kopeikin; six pages later the police chief interrupts to point out that Chichikov has all his limbs—as indeed he could have done after the second sentence [in skaz narration all is illogical, grotesque, and played for comic effect, URB]. Had the tale been meant merely to cap the absurd series of rumors about Chichikov, to demonstrate the absentmindedness of the teller or the density of the listeners, it might have been cut or summarized when the censors objected to it as politically inflammatory. Gogol, however, made a desperate plea for its necessity in terms of form” (Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 177). The critic goes on to say that the Kopeikin tale “parodically mirrors the larger text of which it is a part.” In other words, this skaz narrative is a skaz within a skaz, since you can make the case that all, or nearly all of the narration of DS is skaz, or verges on skaz.

“The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” seems to be an exercise in pure comic absurdity told for laughs. Upon first inspection of the text of DS the Moscow censors cut this tale, but Gogol, in revising and resubmitting it, fought hard to have it included. Various critics have offered reasons why Gogol considered this interpolation so vital to the structure of DS, but their reasons are not particularly convincing. Before beginning his telling of the story, the postmaster declares, “Why, really, if one were to tell this story, it would turn out to be quite the engrossing thing for some writer or other—a whole, like in some such way, epic poem.” Which is to suggest that the Kopeikin tale is a kind of microcosm of the macrocosm of Gogol’s “poem,” DS.

The postmaster, Ivan Andreevich, whom the other town officials always address in macaronic rhyming nonsense as “Ivan Andreich, sprechen sie deich,” first shows up in the narrative amidst the other bureaucrats in Ch. 1. He emerges as a more prominent character in Ch. 10, when the officials meet at the home of the chief of police to discuss the debacle of Chichikov’s dead souls and the wild gossip connected with it. Most of them had even lost weight as a result of all their worries over the alarming rumors. The postmaster is an exception, the only one of the town bureaucrats who remains calm amidst the tsunami of gossip.

“Everybody there showed signs of wear and tear. The Chairman of the Administrative Offices [Civil Courts] had lost weight, and the Inspector of the Board of Health had lost weight, and the Public Prosecutor [soon to drop dead, URB] had lost weight, and a certain Semion Ivanovich, whose surname was never mentioned and who wore upon his right index finger a ring that he always permitted the ladies to examine, well, even he had lost weight.” At the beginning of the Kopeikin tale, Gogol reveals that there were a total of seven town officials at the meeting (or six, plus the ghostly Semion Ivanovich?). Confirmed attendees are the chief of police, the postmaster, the chairman, the medical inspector, the prosecutor. The sixth would certainly be the governor (mayor) of the town of N.

The appearance of the enigmatic Semion Ivanovich here—he shows up nowhere else in the book—is typical of skaz narration throughout the whole of DS. Although Gogol frequently uses omniscient narration, the narrator describing this meeting has limited omniscience. Here the skaz narrator, improbably, has no idea what S.I.’s surname is but knows that he has lost weight; even more improbably, he possesses the information about the ring, knows what finger he wears it on, knows that he likes showing it to the ladies.

In Ch. 8, by way of leading us into his narrative of Ch. 10, the postmaster is described as a reader who dabbles in philosophy. Of the readers mentioned in the book there are few. At the first-grade level of reading, e.g., there is Chichikov’s lackey Petrushka, whose reading skills recall those of another moron, Akaky Akakievich in “The Overcoat.” But the postmaster’s books include Young’s Night Thoughts and Eckarthausen’s The Key to the Mysteries of Nature (for descriptions of these works see Fusso’s notes, p. 153). In addition, the postmaster is described as a wit, “colorful in his choice of words, and fond, as he himself put it, of ‘garnishing’ his speech . . . through a multiplicity of sundry tag-ends and oddments of phrases, such as, ‘my dear sir’ . . . ‘whatsis name’ . . . ‘you know’ . . . ‘you can just imagine’. . . some such as this’ . . . ‘relative so to say’ . . . ‘to a certain degree’ and other suchlike phrases and verbal small change of which he had sackfuls.” The Kopeikin tale would be considerably shortened, were these superfluous hiccups of phrases removed. Interesting point: in most definitions of skaz the narrator is a naïve speaker of low origins, uneducated; Gogol’s most skazified narrators in his other works fit this pattern. The postmaster, on the other hand, may be steeped in his own sort of naivety, but he is presented—well yes, ironically—as an educated man, a thinker.

At one point the postmaster uses the phrase “mozhete predstavit’ sebe (you can well imagine)” five times on one page. When Kopeikin goes to the capital city of St. Petersburg to petition the tsar for help, he thinks in advance how he’ll address the Emperor, and his speech takes on the same redundancy of style: “And so my Captain Kopeikin decided, my dear sir, to set off for Petersburg, to petition the Emperor, as to whether there might not be some kind of monarchial manifesto, thinking, does Kopeikin what he’ll say,  ‘So there you go, this way and that, to a certain, like, extent so to speak, my life I laid down, spilled blood . . .’” Skaz narration often has its weird quirks and details. For example, when Kopeikin arrives in Petersburg he cannot afford lodgings there and ends up finding “a room in a Revel tavern.” This notwithstanding the fact that Revel (now known as Tallinn) is far from Petersburg, is, in fact, the capital of Estonia. Faced with such utter incongruity, translators of Gogol make sense of it by changing the text. Guerney here has Kopeikin finding a snug nook “in a low tavern run by a Finn.” Then again, maybe “Revel tavern” was the term used for a lowlife dive in Gogol’s day.

Failing in his effort to get help from the government, Kopeikin emerges as the one-armed, one-legged leader of a band of brigands in the south. Much mangled by the censorship, much rewritten by the author, the Kopeikin tale survives in three variants. The original ending of the tale—which never made it into published texts—describes Kopeikin’s fleeing to the U.S.A. From there he writes an eloquent letter to the Emperor, explaining his situation. Touched by the brilliance of the style and by the sad tale of an invalid soldier’s fate, the Emperor magnanimously pardons Kopeikin and his fellow bandits. He gives orders to establish charitable committees, which will set up aid for wounded veterans of the War of 1812 (see Smirnova-Chikina, 158-59).

The “Tale of Captain Kopeikin” is clearly a skaz narrative within a book full of skaz narratives and skaz narrators; it is usually considered the best example of skaz in DS. But Gogol’s mastery of skaz narration may be even better exemplified by all of Ch. 9, the most skazified of all the chapters—and the best lengthy example of how DS is a book written about writing a book.

See above, “Omnastics Gymnastics,” for the narrator’s faux anxieties about naming the characters in his novel. We recall that in Ch. 9 we are introduced to two society ladies from the town of N. One visits the other for a session of gossip. Some narrator’s tongue is firmly in cheek—where it has been stuck already for two pages at this point—when he decides to call his first lady character, the one who receives a visitor, “the lady agreeable in all respects.” This narrator, we would first assume, is the holder of tongue in cheek; i.e., were he a savvy, intelligent, worldly narrator he would be. He is not. Almost immediately, he, the bungling teller of this episode, begins stumbling around in a fun house of narrative acrobatics.

“Let’s call the lady whom the guest had come to see what she was almost unanimously called in the town of N: a lady agreeable in all respects. This appellation she had acquired quite legitimately, since she truly had not spared any pains to make herself amiable to the utmost degree, even though, of course, [the weaseling around begins] there could be glimpsed through her amiability an—ooh, ever so brisk—liveliness of a feminine nature; and even though, on occasion, pins and needles—ooh, ever so piercing—would poke out through some pleasant word of hers.” For an entire paragraph the narrator finds himself having to qualify statements he has just made, and when the qualifying leads him too far afield—i.e., too far from his assertion that this is “a lady agreeable in all respects”—he must qualify the qualifying. The point is clearly implied that there are times when this lady is far from agreeable or amiable, in fact, rather disagreeable. But to support his main (already unsupportable) point, the narrator wriggles his way back to what he said at the start: “But all of this [feisty disagreeableness] was clothed in the most refined social grace, such as to be found only in a provincial capital. She performed every move with taste, was even fond of verse, even knew how to hold her head in a dreamy pose at times, and all and sundry concurred that she was, indeed, a lady who was agreeable in all respects.”

What, exactly, is going on here, and in much of Ch. 9? We might recall Nozdryov’s mention of the famous acrobat Fernardi at the fair, tumbling on and on in endless cartwheels. Here we have Gogol’s turning the narrative over to one of his skaz narrators. In the middle of a comic novel, this man puts on a blaze of acrobatics, what amounts to a comedy show, featuring as main character himself—a rather dim and inept teller of tales. The typical skaz narrator in Gogol’s works is a dimwitted type who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. This one certainly does not. He makes short shrift of the second lady, the visitor, who “has not so complex a character” and is simply “an agreeable lady.” Then, as he describes the conversation of the two ladies, he unwittingly puts on his comedy show in the background.

Another way of looking at this narrator would be to consider him a kind of skomorokh-style puppet, who some other, higher narrator controls, dangling him by the strings in front of the reader. As the higher narrator pulls the strings, winking at the reader, the skomorokh, unaware that he’s a puppet, works his way through the acrobatics, putting on his slapstick show behind his own narration. Never mind that elsewhere in the book Gogol has spoken disparagingly of skomorokh-style performance and the sort of laughter it gives rise to. As so often the case with Gogol, the man simply is unaware of what some deep creative neuron is doing when he writes his fiction.

Having already forgotten all his admonitions to himself, about how he has to be careful in naming and describing characters, the narrator also forgets his forced conclusion about how agreeable the clearly disagreeable “lady agreeable in all respects” is. In a spiteful tone of voice she gets in a dig at the vice-governor’s wife, “Parasha said it was the vice-governor’s wife [coming on a visit], and I said, ‘Well, the fool has come again to bore me.’” After this the two ladies spend nearly a whole page discussing ladies’ fashions. In a passage reeking with irony, the narrator describes women of the upper classes engaged in frivolous matters. This begins when the hostess compliments the visitor on what she is wearing: “What a cute little calico print (Kakoj veselen’kij sitets)!” Gogol has a wonderful feel for how women often speak to each other, and—notwithstanding the gnashing of teeth expected from modern ardent feminists who read this passage—the conversation from the early nineteenth century about fashions is still going on, in almost the exact same words, between women all over the world.

Soon the two ladies are addressing each other by name and patronymic. The agreeable lady is Sofya Ivanovna, and the lady agreeable in all respects is Anna Grigorievna. Oops, in revealing the real names the gauche puppet narrator has slipped up again, but he goes right on calling his characters “the lady agreeable in all respects” and “the simply agreeable lady”—as if he has not noticed that they now have names. At one point he pledges to use no foreign words “in this, my Russian poem,” but soon the conversation of the two ladies is sprinkled with French phrases. To top the whole thing off, the public prosecutor—with his bushy eyebrows and blinking left eye—walks into the drawing room where the two ladies sit. So now we know not only the names of the characters, but we realize who Anna Grigorievna (the lady agreeable in all respects) is: she is the wife of the public prosecutor. This is the crowning touch on the efforts of the blundering narrator to protect the names and identities of his characters.

Here I have discussed only the role of the skaz narrator in Ch. 9—his putting on unawares of a separate comedy show, as a kind of narrating skomorokh behind the action. But much else in the chapter, especially the way Gogol begins with the two ladies’ gossip and lets it build into a crescendo of wild rumors, makes it a tour de force of masterful comic writing. This is my favorite chapter in the whole novel. In her book of commentaries on DS, the Soviet writer Smirnova-Chikina—bent on pushing the interpretation of DS as social and political satire—says not a word about the comic effects sparking through the scene of the two ladies, not a word about the acrobatics of the maladroit narrator, his performance in a puppet show as he speaks.

In discussing the point of view of DS, the issue of exactly who is telling us the story, one runs into a wildly complicated business. The answer is that in various parts of the book Gogol uses not one narrator, but a huge variety of narrators. At times it seems that one of these travels around with Chichikov in the britzka, always close at hand and prepared to report on the vicissitudes of the protagonist’s life. In Ch. 6, e.g., the Plewshkin chapter, this could be the narrator who voices the digressive passage at the beginning, telling of how he used to love arriving, e.g., in a new town, where he looked at the denizens of that place and, in effect, re-created them as fictional characters, embellishing them and making them live. This “rider in the britzka” is close at hand in many other parts of the novel, observing and describing, e.g., Chichikov’s bargaining with Sobakievich, or the way he barely escapes being beaten up by Nozdryov.

But here in Ch. 6 we also have another narrator, one who is totally omniscient, who can not only describe Plewshkin as he appears to Chichikov, but can also elaborate on his whole past life—telling us in great detail about his wife and children. The omniscient voice does something similar in describing the lives of the other main landowner characters, Manilov, say, or Nozdryov, but not in such expansive detail as with Plewshkin. The kind of narration here is basically “straight” realism, told without the usual winks behind the skaz narration at the reader. But straight realism is something the artist Gogol finds least amenable to his method. “The real plot (as always with Gogol) lies in the style” (Nabokov, p. 144). “In the twists and turns of the narrative tone, in the dazzling manipulation of the point of view, the intricate verbal play” (Erlich, p. 145).

The easiest interpretation of the omniscient narrator in DS would be to say that this is the author-god of the novel, Nikolai Gogol himself. But there are grounds for asserting that even with omniscient narration in DS Gogol may be using more than one omniscient narrator. Or is this really him? The spate of lyrical digressions in the final chapter may be compared to similar exalted rhetorical passages in letters Gogol wrote to his friends. They certainly sound the same. The stuff about the glories of the road or the promise to write two more volumes that will end with the apotheosis of the Russian Land. The omniscient narrator here certainly has nothing in common with, say, the puppet skomorokh of Ch. 9. He’s not a bungler putting on a puppet show, or is he? For the stuff in the final chapter is not entirely “straight” either—not like that background description of Plewshkin-Mildewshkin’s past life.

If we push the idea of DS as almost total skaz to its limits, even the man voicing those exalted rhetorical passages in Ch. 11, the man who has spent the whole novel trying to escape it—and finally does at the very end—even he could be looked upon as one more bizarre skaz narrator in a book full of skaz narrators. This could be the ultimate irony in an ironic work of fiction teeming in ironies. This omniscient one not at all a lowlife naïve character, but an author—who is not exactly Gogol himself, but a fictionalized, skazified Gogol—whose literary life and religious delusions have left him deranged, seeking a way to write himself into Glory, to “solve the enigma of his very existence.” If we accept this interpretation of DS as a glorious game in toto, one huge piece of skazification, then there’s nothing puzzling at all about the bravura ending.

[excerpted from the forthcoming book by U. R. Bowie: THE FUTILE SEARCH FOR A LIVING SOUL (A New Reading of Gogol's Dead Souls)]