LEITMOTIFS: BOOTS
Here Yermakov does not identify the memoir in question, and you
wonder if this tale is fabricated, based on the scene of the lieutenant from
Riazan, who examines boot heels at the end of Ch. 7 of DS. Memoirs of
Gogol’s friends and acquaintances frequently describe this sort of spying on
Gogol as he worked—or, here, as he relaxed—apparently in an attempt to delve
into the secrets of his creativity. Yermakov suggests that Gogol was aware of
the spies, and enjoyed putting on something of a performance for them.
Doubtful. But then, he was capable of such behavior. His whole life was highly
performative.
Boots go tromping their way all through the narrative of DS.
In Ch. 1 Chichikov calls upon nearly all the town officials, and he meets in
passing some of the landowners whom he will later visit in search of dead souls
to buy: Manilov, Sobakievich and Nozdryov. A burly bear-like man, Sobakievich
begins their acquaintance by trodding on his foot. After Manilov invites
Chichikov to visit his estate, “Sobakievich also said, rather laconically,
‘Come see me too,’ scraping one foot that was shod in a boot of such gigantic
proportions that its equal was hardly to be found anywhere . . .”
Boots seem to be on everyone’s mind. Korobochka (Ch. 3) mentions
to Chichikov that some three years back her sister brought some warm boots from
Moscow for the children; “very solid stuff, it was, and still wearing well.” Upon
Chichikov’s departure from her estate, Korobochka sends a little peasant girl,
Pelageia, to ride a short ways on the britzka and point out the road to the
highway. She is described as a girl of about eleven standing near the porch, in
a homespun dress and “with bare feet that, from a distance, might have been
thought shod in boots, so plastered with fresh mud were they.”
Bragging on his dead souls in Ch. 5, Sobakievich mentions “Maksim
Teliatnikov, a bootmaker; he’d just run his awl through a piece of leather, and
there was a pair of boots for you, and for every pair you’d want to thank him,
and it wasn’t as if he ever took a single drop of spirits in his mouth.” In Ch.
6 the miserly Plewshkin makes one pair of communal boots do for all his
menials:
“At last the door opened and in came Proshka, a lad of thirteen, in
such large boots that at every step he took he all but stepped out of them. The
reason why Proshka wore such large boots can be explained without delay: Plewshkin
had for all his domestics, no matter how many of them might be in the house,
but the one pair of boots, which always had to be left standing in the entry. Anyone
summoned to the master’s chambers had to prance barefoot through the entire
yard, and, upon reaching the entry, had to don these boots and appear in the
room only when thus shod. On coming out of the room he had to leave the boots
in the entry again and set off anew on his own soles. Had anyone glanced out
the little window on an autumn day, and especially when slight hoarfrost set in
of mornings, he would have seen all the domestics in the midst of such grand
jetés of leaps as even the sprightliest of ballet dancers in theaters could
hardly have hoped to perform.” Plewshkin’s
pile of assorted objects scarfed up at random on his daily walks includes “an
old boot-sole.”
The tale of the communal boots in Plewshkin’s household strikes an
odd note, given that it describes the exact opposite ritual from that which
takes place in countless Russian modern households. Someone entering a house or
apartment from outdoors will immediately remove dirty shoes or boots in the
anteroom, donning slippers available there. But then, I suppose that
Plewshkin’s ritual achieves the same purpose: keeping mud and dirt out of the
inner rooms.
In Ch. 7 Chichikov is described as donning “morocco boots with fancy
appliqués of variegated colors,” such as are to be found selling briskly in the
town of Torzhok. Chichikov’s attire has been frequently described in detail
earlier—especially his frockcoat of lingonberry red with sparkles. A strange
lapse here: that the author waited seven chapters to tell us about his boots. Something
else weird about this passage: Chichikov, in celebration of his having acquired
almost four hundred dead souls, jumps out of bed, dons the boots, and does a
little dance. Who on earth begins dressing right out of bed by putting on
boots? More on the dance scene later in this book. A similar stylistic faux pas
occurs in Ch. 11, when Chichikov, angry with Selifan, throws his sword down on
the floor—"the sword that accompanied him on all his travels, to inspire
appropriate awe wherever necessary.” That’s
odd, thinks the reader; we’re almost all the way through the book, and only
now does this sword show up in Chichikov’s hands, or dangling at his side.
How does Gogol know that morocco boots are selling well in Torzhok?
Probably because he saw them on sale there in October, 1839, when, traveling
with members of the Aksakov family by stagecoach from Moscow to St. Petersburg,
they stopped off in Torzhok (see U.R. Bowie, Gogol’s Head, p. 97-98).
Aware that his main character in DS would need some nice boots, Gogol
probably went ahead and bought him some then.
Among the weird ghostly characters who come crawling out of the
woodwork in Ch. 9—aroused by the wild tsunami of rumors—are “the lie-abeds and
sit-by-the-fires who had been lolling and vegetating at home in their dressing
gowns for years, placing the blame for their indolence either upon the bungling
bootmaker who had made their boots too tight, or on their worthless tailor, or
on their drunkard of a coachman . . .”
In a (or the) climactic scene of the novel, at the ball (Ch. 8),
the drunken Nozdryov reveals to all and sundry that Chichikov “trades in dead
souls.” The boot theme marches into this episode as well. After the incident at
the ball Chichikov feels awkward and ill at ease, “every whit as if he had stepped
with brightly polished boot into a filthy, stinking puddle.”
Gogol’s letters sometimes make reference to boots, and the
importance he personally attaches to them. In a letter to S.T. Aksakov from
Vienna (July 7, 1840), e.g., Gogol asks Aksakov’s son, who will be travelling
to Western Europe, to bring him several things, among them a volume of
Shakespeare and editions of folk songs collected by Maksimovich. “And here’s
the main thing: buy or get Mikhail Semenovich [Shchepkin] to buy some
Petersburg tanned leather from the best bootmaker—the softest kind for making
boots, i.e., only the upper leather (which is already cut out so that it won’t
take up space and is easy to carry); two or three pairs. Had a bad thing
happen: all the boots that Také made for me turned out to be too short. That
stubborn German! I tried to tell him they’d be short, but he, the boot-tree,
didn’t want to listen to me! And they’re so wide that my feet have swollen up.
It would be good if you could get that leather to me: they make rather good
boots here.”
P.S. ON BOOTS: LT. RIAZAN
The boot theme in DS finds its culmination at the end of Ch. 7, with the appearance of the lieutenant from Riazan—a character whom one of my students on an exam once described as “Lt. Riazan.” His rank in the Tsarist army is poruchik, which most approximates in the modern American army that of first lieutenant. This personage has already peeked into the novel near the end of Ch. 6, when the waiter at the inn informs Chichikov that “yesterday we had some kind of military lieutenant arrive; he’s taken Room 16 . . . Don’t know who he is; from Riazan; he’s got bay horses.”
Gogol ends several chapters by playing parodic games with the
rather hackneyed device, especially in Romantic literature, of ending a chapter
in a novel by putting the characters to sleep, then panning, say, outside for a
beautiful description of a moonlit night. Ch. 6, we recall, concludes with
Chichikov sleeping “that marvelous slumber known only to those fortunate beings
who are bothered neither by hemorrhoids, nor fleas, nor over-developed
intellectual faculties.” At the end of Ch. 7, instead of taking us outside to
show us the full moon and the fluttering linden leaves, Gogol’s narrator takes
us inside another room at the inn and shows us a scene verging on absurdity.
At the end of Ch. 7 Chichikov returns drunk to the inn from the
party celebrating his purchase of the dead souls. He is at the acme of his good
fortune in the novel, “never having felt so happy, already imagining himself a
real landowner in Kherson.” He sleeps, and his menials, Petrushka and Selifan
go off and get drunk together, then come back and fall, in their turn, into a
deep sleep:
“They both fell asleep the same moment, raising a snore of
unheard-of intensity, to which the master from next door responded with a high-pitched
nasal whistle. . . Soon after the arrival of the two, everything grew quiet,
and the inn was enveloped in profound sleep, save that in a single little
window there was still a glimmer of light to be seen, coming from a room in
which some lieutenant from Riazan was staying. Evidently he had a great
weakness for boots, for he had already ordered four pairs and was now incessantly
tying on a fifth. Several times he approached the bed, intending to take them
off and lie down, but he just could not bring himself to do so; the boots were
indeed well made, and for a long while yet he went on raising now this foot,
and now the other, inspecting the deftly and wondrously turned heel of each
boot.”
What we have here could well be a scene refracted through a dream
by Chichikov. Often in our dreams the dream producers make use of incidental
characters who have appeared in our waking moments. At least in his
subconscious Chichikov may be pondering on this Lt. Riazan, whom the waiter has
mentioned to him in Ch.6. Furthermore, there is something dreamlike about the
way the scene is written, since in one skewed sentence Lt. Riazan seems to be,
simultaneously, in his hotel room about to go to bed and in some shoe-shop
trying on boots.
Here's Vladimir Nabokov on that scene:
“Thus the chapter ends—and that lieutenant is still trying on his
immortal jackboot, and the leather glistens, and the candle burns straight and
bright in the only lighted window of a dead town in the depth of a star-dusted
night. I know of no more lyrical description of nocturnal quiet than this
Rhapsody of the Boots” (Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, p. 83). Here Nabokov,
with his usual deft use of description, not only praises Gogol’s chapter ending
as beautifully lyrical, but, in so doing, also writes his own beautifully
lyrical sentence, as if to say, “See there: I can do it too.” Nabokov’s book on
Gogol, by the way, is especially notable (and welcome) in that it defies the
standard professorial practice of writing literary criticism in a dense and
ponderous, even sometimes opaque style—see, e.g., James B. Woodward’s lumbering,
humorless monograph on DS. It’s worth noting as well that near the end
of Ch. 8, after Chichikov’s disastrous encounter with Nozdryov at the ball, the
whole town is described as sleeping, while perturbed Chichikov does not sleep a
wink all night long.
As if Gogol were playing with the different ways to get sleepers (and
anxious non-sleepers) in at the end of chapters, the ending of Ch. 8 also has
its sui generis sleeping scene—this makes three chapters in a row with sleepers
at the end. A long description of Korobochka’s ramshackle carriage entering the
town concludes with two ancillary characters asleep: (1) a night watchman on
the other end of town, awakened by the clamor of the carriage, cries out “Who
goes there?” Hearing only “a distant rumble,” he captures an insect crawling
over his collar and “executes” it on his fingernail, before going back to
sleep; (2) upon arrival of the Korobochka carriage at the home of the priest’s
wife, a threadbare lackey riding footman is “pulled down by his feet,” since he
is “in a dead sleep.” From the carriage emerges Korobochka, who has spent
“three sleepless nights,” worried that she has sold her souls to Chichikov at
too low a price.
In his novel Pnin, which he was working on roughly at the same
time that he wrote his book on Gogol, Nabokov himself toys with the device of
ending chapters by putting the characters to sleep. He does this by way of
playing games with the POV of the omniscient narrator. At the end of Ch. 3 Timofey
Pnin, off in dreamland, is awakened by the return of the Clements’ daughter
Isabel. At the end of the next chapter Pnin is afflicted with insomnia and bad
dreams: “His back hurt. It was now past four. The rain had stopped.
“Pnin sighed a Russian ‘okh-okh-okh’ sigh, and sought a more
comfortable position. Old Bill Sheppard trudged to the downstairs bathroom,
brought down the house, then trudged back.
“Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the
display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous
puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black
zigzags” (Pnin, end of Ch. 4).
What else can we possibly make of the appearance of “Lt. Riazan”
in the book? For one thing, in terms of the social and moral message of the novel,
the lieutenant could be representative of the obsession with gross materialism
characteristic of nearly everyone in DS. He is so devoid of spiritual
qualities that he makes boots the principal thing in his life, an object of
almost religious awe. One more dead soul, an empty-headed materialist, the
lieutenant makes his appearance—possibly in Chichikov’s dream—right at the
point where the novel’s hero has attained to his greatest success. He could
present something of an omen, suggesting that one who chases the god of
materialism, as does Chichikov, is due for a big fall. The rest of the novel,
beginning with Ch. 8, shows the comeuppance of Chichikov in the town of N. The appearance
of the boot-loving lieutenant could be seen as the climax of the book, or at
least one high point/near climax. The biggest high point/climax comes with the
ball scene in Ch. 8, and, especially, the moment that the drunk Nozdryov blurts
out to one and all: “he trades in dead souls.”
THE
FUTILE SEARCH FOR A LIVING SOUL
[A
NEW READING OF GOGOL’S DEAD SOULS (МЕРТВЫЕ ДУШИ)]
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