Gogol in 1834
This article
originally published in JRL (“Johnson’s Russian List”), June 2, 2009
Russian Attitudes
Toward Humor and Irony
(“Russian Mindsets
Series,” No. 2)
Man
Discovers He’s Afflicted with Comic Genius; Man Dies of It
(The
Case of Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852)
“DEAD SOULS was the cenobitic
cell where Gogol the monk floundered around, suffering travail and torment,
until, finally, he was dragged, lifeless, out of that cell.”
P. V. Annenkov
What better proof is there than
the life of Nikolai Gogol of the age-old Russian bias against laughter,
especially against the laughter that criticizes, satirizes, or (horror of
horrors) gets ironic? Who among Russian writers could, still can, make us laugh
like Gogol does? Nobody. Who among Russian writers so invested his best
creative fiction with the pure light play of humor? Nobody. Well, maybe the
great Aleksandr Pushkin, but Pushkin did his best work in poetry, not prose.
Recently (spring, 2008) St.
Petersburg unveiled a new monument to the Nose, central character of the Gogol
story, about a nose that escapes from a man’s face and goes off on its own.
Prior to this there was an unofficial nose monument, at the crossroads of
Voznesensky Prospekt and Rimsky-Korsakov
Street, but, true to the rambunctious carnival
spirit that the nose story embodies, pranksters repeatedly absconded with that
Nose. Do Russians have a sense of humor, do they love to laugh? You bet. But
deep in their guts and their national culture they have powerful restrictions
against laughter as well.[i]
What Russia once had
and what it has long since lost is best described by M.M. Bakhtin in his book
about Rabelais and the folk laughter of the Middle Ages. The implications of
this book go far beyond Gogol, but we may restrict ourselves, for the time
being, to him. Bakhtin’s major points are as follows: (1) Carnival laughter
laughs at everything about life. Nothing is sacred. It transcends mere satire,
which is didactic and, ultimately, sullen. (2) Gogol’s “positive,” “bright,” and “elevated” laughter “arose on
the basis of the folk culture of laughter.” (3) Deep in the soul of his
artistic self the writer-genius Gogol understood the “universal nature of his
laughter,” but he was fated to live at a time when somber readers and critics
demanded that artistic literature reflect the social problems of the times.[ii]
For Russians the central
problem of laughter (the unbridled laughter of freedom) is this: nothing is off
limits. This kind of laughter laughs at everything, holds every human being and
every human institution up to mockery. Now, even when you do not have a paranoiac
thug like Stalin in power, such an attitude, to put it mildly, is dangerous. Of
course, when you DO have a Stalin in power, he will slam his dictatorial fist
down hard on laughter. The Stalins are not so much non-laughers; they just will
not tolerate laughter aimed at themselves. Stalin had a wonderful sense of
humor. He enjoyed laughing heartily while outwitting a political opponent,
while having people tormented or killed.
During the entire period of
Gogol’s life as a writer another brute was in power: Tsar Nicholas I. Did he
want anybody laughing at him or his institutions? Hardly. It is said that
Gogol’s comedy, REVIZOR (THE INSPECTOR GENERAL) passed the censorship through
the personal intervention of Tsar Nicholas. Maybe. Dictators sometimes like to
appear magnanimous. So the story goes, Nicholas attended a performance of the
play, laughed throughout it, then declared upon departing the theater: “Well, we
all took it on the chin tonight, and me most of all.” Such a story is probably
apocryphal. One can imagine Nicholas (or Stalin) attending such a play, then
signing an order for the writer’s arrest and torture.[iii]
But the Russian imperative not
to laugh is predicated not only on the fact that despots control the country
(true, they frequently do). It is predicated, as well, on the whole history of
Russian mentalities. It is also an established principle in the thousand-year
history of Russian Orthodoxy. For the church, a grave and humorless institution
that venerates, e.g., the “gift of tears,” laughter is associated with Russia’s
long and formidable history of paganism. Pagans laugh; Christians don’t.
Much of this is a subject for a separate
article, but suffice it to say the following for now: mocking laughter, for
Russians, is scary. The kind of laughter that says, “We can deride anything,
anybody,” undermines the (always shaky) political and cultural system. It
militates against the one thing that Russians have been seeking for a thousand
years of their history: stability, or to use the favorite Russian word: poryadok
(order). If you don’t have order, what do you have? The most fearful thing of
all: anarchy. “Give us anything,” say the Russian people. “Give us, above all,
a father figure we can rely on [Peter the Great, a martinet-brute, Nicholas I,
a martinet-brute, Stalin, etc., etc.]. Why do we need leaders like this, those
whose stature automatically insures their immunity to laughter and mockery? Because
they, and only they, can bring us ORDER.”
What is the essence of great
art? A difficult question. Great art sometimes amounts to pure unrestricted
play as creativity. Not always, but often. In his brilliant book on play in
human life, the Dutch historian Huizinga notes that poetry “lies beyond
seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the
animal, the savage and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment,
ecstasy, laughter.” Huizinga goes on to mention that the eighteen century, bathed
in the spirit of the Enlightenment, was an age full of lightness and
playfulness. Soon this spirit was repressed. “Never had an age [the nineteenth
century] taken itself with more portentous seriousness.”
As a result, anyone dancing,
laughing, or having raucous fun was equated to the jugglers, mummers, tumblers:
low-class marketplace entertainers (and pagans). Of course, the despots like
this sort of thing, as long as they are in control of it. Ivan the Terrible and
Peter the Great, e.g., had their blasphemous institutions, their court buffoons
and entertainer-dwarfs. Stalin even had a double who looked exactly like him. The
spirited dictator sometimes used this man to mortify and freak out his
subordinates, while Uncle Joe watched from behind a curtain, chuckling merrily.
In terms of Gogol, more to
the point is what Huizinga says about how the renowned artistic talents of the
eighteenth century DID NOT TAKE THEMSELVES OR LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY: “Even Bach
and Mozart could hardly have been aware that they were pursuing anything more
than the noblest of pastimes. . . And was it not just this sublime naiveté that
enabled them to soar to the heights of perfection?”[iv]
Here is the main point of my
article: Gogol HAD that sublime naiveté, then suppressed it within himself and
perished. What led him to suppress it? His psychic imprisonment in the cultural
and religious oubliette called “Don’t Laugh.”
Russia, unfortunately, missed, for the most part, the
sparkling, witty lightness of literary art that came out of eighteenth-century Western Europe.[v] The
great Russian tradition of nineteenth century literature, the pride of Russian
culture, is, largely, dead serious. The British critic D.J. Richards once made
an attempt to classify all Russian writers as either “wits” or “worshippers.”
The witty ones, of whom Russia
has few representatives, are characterized by playfulness, a lightness of
spirit, by elegance of style, and by exhibitionist self-assertion. Wit, says
Richards, “went into a rapid decline, however, in the late thirties and early
forties” of the nineteenth century, “as control of the Russian intellectual
world passed from the French-educated upper class into the hands of the
predominantly middle-class and plebeian types. . . The mainstream of Russian
literature became committed to the ideals of either religious revival or social
progress; moral concerns took predominance over esthetic considerations.” Everything
had to be serious and “earnest in tone,” while “self-confident and elegant aristocratic
individualism was no longer valued…”
Richards notes that “the
wittiest Russian writers of any stature to emerge in the twentieth century were
an aristocratic émigré, Nabokov, and two Soviet heretics, Zamyatin and
Sinyavsky.” He also, tellingly, mentions “the firmly felt association between
wit and apostasy,” and goes on to say that “wit, like the individualism from
which it springs, is fundamentally uncongenial to the Russian spirit.”[vi]
Richards does not mention another telling fact: that Nabokov is looked upon by
many Russians as somehow alien and foreign. They think that he sold out to
American literature (because he switched over to writing in English while
living in the U.S.),
but their major objection is his artistic stance—he is a wit who loves irony, and
irony makes them uncomfortable.[vii]
The major point of Richards’
article is that Russians tend to be “worshippers” rather than wits, and that Russian
literature usually reflects this attitude. The “worshipper” is dead serious
about life, morality, politics, religion. Among the Russian writers who are,
primarily, “worshippers” are some of the greats: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Akhmatov,
Pasternak, and many others. Richards declares that the outstanding poets
Pushkin and Lermontov are undeniably wits, but he has trouble coming up with
any more good examples. Both of these poets, furthermore, died before the
middle of the nineteenth century (Pushkin in 1837, Lermontov in 1841).
Of those who don’t take life (or
themselves) too seriously, I would definitely include Anton Chekhov
(1860-1904), a Russian writer who has a sense of measure about everything. Having
a sense of measure is not usually characteristic of the Russian writer-“worshipper,”
and probably of Russians in general! Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the most famous of
all Russian writers, the greatest prose writers, have talent, genius--but who
would claim that they have a sense of measure? As for Nikolai Gogol, Richards
waffles on this puzzling figure, but what follows below is my take on Gogol,
the writer and the man.
In the first place, of all
Russian writers, Gogol may be the most mysterious. He kept his personal life
secret, confiding in practically no one. Once, in a letter, he wrote, “Dushi
moej nikto ne mozhet znat’” (“No one can ever know my soul”).[viii]
His biographers, who have trouble discovering the usual things biographers
discover, seem to agree on one point: that Gogol was a strange character. Furthermore,
they imply, or even illustrate (by the letters he wrote) that in his final
years he was practically insane. On the background and early years see, e.g.,
Setchkarev. He provides some details about Gogol’s strange mother, Maria Gogol,
who reported that when her future husband was fourteen, the Mother of God
appeared to him in a vision and pointed out his future wife (who was her,
Maria, then a seven-month-old child). Setcharev also repeats a detailed story
told by Gogol to Aleksandra Smirnova, a close friend, about how the future
writer drowned a cat when he was five years old. In his creative but outré biography
of Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov plays up this sort of thing, although he sometimes
goes overboard in embellishing Gogol’s eccentricities.[ix]
Central in Gogol’s life,
undoubtedly, was the Eastern Orthodox religion; ultimately, it was his religious
mania that led to his premature death. In the early years of his life, however,
at the time he was developing as a writer, his creative comic genius operated
largely unhampered by his religious concerns. Influenced most saliently in his
mature period by Aleksandr Pushkin, who was not only a Russian nationalist, but
also a creature of the French Enlightenment, Gogol sometimes defended the comic
side of his works. This is not to say that he ever comprehended the vast
implications of folk laughter (as explicated later by Bakhtin), even though his
early works are heavily dependent on the raucous spirit of Ukrainian folklore.
A Ukrainian by birth, Gogol is
perhaps the most intuitive artistic genius in the history of Russian
literature. By this I mean that he just wrote his fiction, not knowing exactly
what he was doing and (at least early on in his career) not anticipating the
reaction of his future readers.[x] He
enjoyed writing rather odd supernatural tales. He enjoyed writing comedy,
making people laugh. Especially after the uproar over his comic play, THE
INSPECTOR GENERAL, first staged in 1836, Gogol began to understand that comedy
was a genre frequently denigrated, that a lot of people in Russia were
offended by his play, and he began to fight back against his critics. In an
article titled “After the Theatre” (1842), he asserts that “No one noticed the
honest person who was in my play… this honest, noble person is laughter.” Later in the same article he
goes on to say that “laughter is bright” and that his denigrators “do not 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.”[xi]
In the body of his last, and
perhaps greatest work of art, DEAD SOULS, Gogol includes a few more passages in
defense of comedy and laughter. In one of them, e.g., he writes that “the
judgment of contemporaneity does not acknowledge that lofty, rapturous laughter
is worthy of taking its place beside the loftiest of lyrical exhalations, and that
a huge abyss separates it from the grimacings of a marketplace entertainer!”
(Chapter Seven).[xii] Gogol
was adamant about calling his work not a novel, but a “poem” (poèma); on the
title page of the first published edition “POEM” was the most prominent word.
Quite possibly most of the
Russian reading public even today has that same condescending view of humor.
Notwithstanding that, anyone who understands artistic literature realizes that
beneath the laughing veneer of any great comic work there lies a firm
foundation of seriousness, even profundity. Perhaps the best example of this in
world literature is Gogol’s DEAD SOULS. Even such a socially-minded critic as Vissarion
Belinsky (1811-1848), the great Westernizer, who is sometimes criticized for
failing to appreciate the aesthetics of literature, understood this. In his
review of the novel right after it was published, Belinsky writes that such a
work of depth requires a second reading. “It also bears repetition [Belinsky
went on] that “humor is accessible only to the deep and highly developed soul;
the crowd [rabble] neither understands nor appreciates it. . . The ‘comic’ and
‘humor’ are understood by the majority in Russia as clownish, as caricature.
. . I will only say that Gogol was not joking when he called his novel a
‘poem,’ and that by this he does not mean a comic poem. . . One could not look
more erroneously on DEAD SOULS or understand it more crudely than to see in it
a satire.”[xiii]
Certainly Gogol the artistic
genius understood that he was writing something other than mere satire, but
Gogol the man, it is apparent, often did not have a clue. When, under the
influence of Pushkin (who gave him the plot about buying up dead peasants),
Gogol began writing DEAD SOULS in 1835, he had quite a different idea of what
it was to become than later on, during its composition: “I was going to begin
writing without setting myself any detailed plan. . . I simply thought that the
humorous project that Chichikov undertakes[xiv]
would in itself lead me to varied persons and characters and that the very
desire to laugh, originating within me, would itself create a multitude of
humorous phenomena, which I intended to blend with touching ones.”[xv]
The first mention of his writing the novel was in a letter to Pushkin (1835).
In this letter Gogol promises his literary mentor that the book will be “sil’no
smeshon” (hilariously funny).[xvi]
But even in the earliest
stages of composing DEAD SOULS, Gogol had already begun to suspect that laughter was simply not sufficient. In
his “Author’s Confession” Gogol writes that “After ‘The Inspector General’ I
felt more than ever before the need to write a complete work, which would
contain not only that which deserves laughter” (cited in Gippius materials,
Norton Critical Edition, p. 490). Then again, these assertions may not be
entirely believable, because the so-called “Author’s Confession” was written
after DEAD SOULS had been published, and Gogol was notorious for presenting simplistic
explanations of his complex literary works ex post facto.[xvii]
Sometimes such interpretations (such as his explications of the intricate INSPECTOR
GENERAL) can vie in their banality with those of the most simplistic teachers
of artistic literature.
I have no doubt that many
high school teachers in Russia today are still ponderously informing their
dozing pupils that Gogol’s DEAD SOULS is a satire, and a realistic portrayal of
the lives of Russian landowners in the 1830s. At least they were quite
recently. Some of my students at Novgorod
University (where I
taught as a Fulbright Scholar in 1999-2000) were shocked to learn that the
novel (or ‘poem’) was anything other than straight realism. This despite
generations of the best critics, Russian and foreign, who have published a
multitude of articles and books about the aesthetic genius and complexity of
the book.
Of course, it is easy to go
to the other extreme (as has Nabokov in his book on Gogol), asserting that DEAD
SOULS reflects in no way Russian realities and real Russian types. The real
types are there, and characters such as the landowners Sobakevich and Nozdryov
are still walking the streets of the Russian realm even today. In fact, when
you read about the bribe-takers and swindlers of the novel, you cannot help
drawing parallels with similar types in modern Russia. At its basic mode of
functioning Russia
today still works the same way that the Russia of Gogol’s novel worked. If you
would like to be totally cynical about things, you could even make a case that
the Chichikovian spirit has taken over the country since the fall of Communism.
It sometimes seems that practically everybody (like Chichikov) is out to GET,
TO ACQUIRE material wealth: to fulfill the Chichikovian dream of acquisition.
But, then again, this is true
of modern America too, oh
yes; take a look at what has happened in America quite recently. Maybe it’s
true of the whole world? Like any work of literary art, DEAD SOULS has
relevance for human beings all over the face of the earth. It is not only about
Russians; it is about PEOPLE. That’s one reason the whole world should read it.
Furthermore, swindlers buying
up “dead souls” (dead peasants still on the tax rolls) actually existed before
the novel was ever written (see the Gippius book, p. 137).[xviii]
So DEAD SOULS is realism, but it, ultimately, is much more than that. If it
were not it would not be numbered among the greatest creative works in all of
world literature.
The closest parallel to what
Gogol created in DEAD SOULS is Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel in verse, EVGENY ONEGIN
(written 1825-1832). It teems with sparkling wit, word play, irony; it indulges
itself in digressions, direct address to the reader, and so on. These are the
same kinds of devices that Gogol utilized in his gamboling, scintillating novel/poem,
and there is little doubt that Pushkin had an enormous influence on Gogol’s
longest creation.
At the time of Pushkin’s
death in 1837 Gogol probably was already beginning to lose his own creative
bearings. Unlike Pushkin, most of Gogol’s other friends had much more than
aesthetics in mind when they spoke of high art. The Aksakovs, for example (not
so much father Sergei, but sons Konstantin and Ivan) were affiliated with the
Slavophile movement, and they hoped that Gogol would reflect the views of the
Slavophiles in his fiction. The greatest critic of the times, Belinsky, on the
other hand, was a Westernizer, who championed fiction that expressed views
antithetical to those of the Slavophile movement. Belinsky was adamantly
opposed to Gogol’s religious bent, but then, even Sergei Aksakov balked at the bizarre
sanctimony in the letters he received from Gogol. Himself a man of literary
talent, and one who was in close contact with Gogol the whole time he was
writing DEAD SOULS, Aksakov became ever more convinced that the writer (in the
decade of the 1840s) was succumbing to religious mysticism.
The story of his writing of
DEAD SOULS encompasses the last seventeen years of Gogol’s life (1835-1852).
The novel’s history encompasses a grand total of twenty years (if we take into
account that the fragments of the second part of the book were published only in
1855). Gogol, who died in his early forties, devoted a large portion of his
life to his preoccupation with dead souls and DEAD SOULS. It is generally
assumed that he perished of his failed attempt to animate dead souls, to make
something living out of them. How and why he perished, however, is a
complicated issue. To put it simply, Gogol was ruined by (1) the tenor of the
times in Russian intellectual circles, the imperative that literature be
serious and morally edifying (2) the prevailing interdiction of laughter in a
thousand years of Russian history (3) his own strong personal belief in the
devil.
By the time that Nikolai
Gogol lived (and especially later on, in the second half of the nineteenth
century) probably the majority of Russian writers, thinkers, intellectuals were
secular in their views. They were not actively practicing Christians, as was
Gogol, a man whose piousness went (eventually) to extremes. Furthermore, as
pointed out repeatedly by critics, the devil played a special role in Gogol’s
life. Two examples: (1) Edmund Wilson: “It was always the Devil who appeared to
him, never the Savior he hoped for” (Wilson
article in Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS, p. 546) (2) Vladimir Nabokov:
“the Devil, in whose existence. . . Gogol believed far more seriously than he
did in that of God” (Nabokov, NIKOLAI GOGOL, p. 73). Practically all of Gogol’s
works are rife with mention of the devil, invocations of the devil, even
appearances of the devil.
In the early years of his
writing career, Gogol found ways to make the devil comic, to laugh off his
influence. Throughout most of his career he did things in his art that Pushkin
would find risible, but that church authorities would frown upon. For example,
in his famous short story “The Overcoat,” Gogol gives his hapless lead
character the name of an obscure Orthodox martyr, Akakij, whose saint’s day is
celebrated on May 20. What’s more significant, he names Akakij after Akakij’s father.
The character, consequently, became “Akakij Akakievich,” a name that is
ludicrous and funny, a name, what’s more, that has strong scatological
overtones (“kaka” or “kakashka”, in Russian, means “crap”). The religious
believer in Gogol would never sanction taking a saint’s name and making a
mockery of it, but the writer of comic fiction reveled in this sort of thing.
At his best Gogol, like
Pushkin, was an ironist, not a satirist. For satire in Russian literature read Saltykov-Shechdrin
(1826-1889). What’s the difference between satire and irony? The main
difference is that the satirist, sphincter muscles tightly clenched, goes about
castigating evil doers and evil institutions in no uncertain terms. When you
read a satirist, you can tell the good guys from the bad. The ironist (or, to
use Richards’ formula, the wit) takes nothing seriously, holds up all truths to
doubt, laughs lightly, tolerantly at human foibles.
Some readers of the 1840s denigrated
Gogol’s greedy landowner types, as portrayed in DEAD SOULS. Some of them
protested that the author had depicted only negative, venal types. They called
for some positive characters. Such readers, unfortunately, have always been
around, and I suppose they always will be. They are the readers with little of no
sense of humor.
Is a personage such as the
bear-like Sobakevich to be taken as an accurate portrayal of a real grasping
and greedy Russian landowner of the times? Only to a limited extent. Do you feel
like spitting in disgust in the presence of Sobakevich? Not really. The
laughter gets in the way. Sobakevich is so FUNNY that the reader comes to
appreciate him. Furthermore, in a totally unexpected move, Gogol makes
Sobakevich into a kind of poet, who goes into poetic raptures when he describes
(and by so doing resurrects) the dead peasants who once lived on his estate.
As mentioned above, the
ironist is a threat to established institutions. He who gets people laughing at
EVERYTHING is a potential apostate and troublemaker. Throughout a thousand
years of Russian history laughter has always been closely associated with FEAR,
and fear of his own talent overwhelmed Gogol in the latter years of his life.
As Donald Fanger writes, the late Gogol “seems to have half agreed with the
popular Russian assumption that derision bespeaks sinfulness (U nas smekh
prinimajut za grekh, sledovatel’no, vsjakij nasmeshnik dolzhen byt’ velikij
greshnik [With us laughter is taken to be sinful; consequently, he who sneers
and gibes must be a great sinner].”[xix] Gogol’s
main personal problem was this: GOD does not appreciate irony. At least most
true believers believe that, and Gogol was a true believer.
In the early years of his
writing career Gogol was blithely unaware of what Mann (p. 8) has called his
“problema ‘veselosti’” (problem of ‘merriment’). But soon after the clamor
resulting from the premier of THE INSPECTOR GENERAL (1836), Gogol fled abroad.
He did not like controversy, and he wanted to be left alone, to commune with
his odd characters and his eccentric art. For years he travelled incessantly
throughout Europe, skipping from city to city,
from country to country. This, apparently, was the time period when he began
pondering deeply on the influence his works had had on the Russian reading or
viewing public. In a letter (1836) to his friend and fellow writer Zhukovsky,
the messianic tone of so many later letters is already there: “I swear that
I’ll do something the ordinary person cannot do. I feel the strength of a lion
in my soul. . .” (cited in Mann, p. 27).
The rest of Gogol’s life
consisted of his frenetic travels, from one European locale to another, while
writing DEAD SOULS and while sending his friends grandiloquent letters: about
his holy mission, about how he was an instrument of God, about how the
completion of the book (in three volumes) would “solve the riddle of my very
existence.”
In other words, even before Vol I.
(actually, the only extant volume) of Dead Souls was finished and
published (1842), Gogol was dreaming grandiose dreams of what he would
accomplish in its sequels. In late drafts of the first volume he added lyrical
digressions, in which an author-narrator persona dreams lofty dreams about the
future of Russia.
In the text of the novel (“poem”) itself, he promised his reader that great
things were to be accomplished in future volumes. In a word, it wasn’t just going
to be about humor any more, and the characters were no longer going to be venal
and funny (the only kind of characters that Gogol knew how to write). The lofty
and portentous question posed at the end of Vol. I, “Russian, whither dost thou
hasten” (“Rus’, kuda zh neseshsja ty?”) would be answered in volumes to come.
Gogol spent the rest of his
life trying (failing) to write Vol. II, while making promises (to himself, to
his friends, his readers, to everybody) about how great it would be, even
transformative, when he finally got it done.
By this time Nikolai Gogol
was no longer a mere writer in his own mind; he was God’s servitor, a kind of
ascetic and monk, bent on fulfilling “khudozhnicheskij podvig” (an artistic
feat of religious import—these are Mann’s words, p. 32). As for laughter, that light
ironic laughter characteristic of his best writing, well, that just would not
do any more. In his “Author’s Confession” Gogol writes, tellingly, “I saw that
I was laughing in vain and to no purpose in my works, 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” (Cited in Norton
Critical Edition, p. 482-83; the original Russian may be found in COLLECTED
WORKS, Vol. 6, 442-43.)
In other words, “Let me be a
satirist,” said Gogol (to himself). His comic genius, however, dug in its
heels: “No! You’re an IRONIST.”
Even after the writer had
firmly resolved to be a preacher of morality and a castigator of human
depravity, the comic genius was still alive in him. Just read his description
(in a letter to P.A. Pletnyov, Jan. 7, 1842) of the meeting of the Moscow
censorship committee, whose members had come together to decide whether the
first volume of DEAD SOULS could be printed (for the Russian, see Mann, p.
111-114; for the English, see Norton Critical Edition, p. 427-430). One censor
declares that the manuscript must be prohibited because “the soul is immortal.”
It cannot, consequently be “dead.” In selecting such a title for his book, the blasphemous
author denies the religious truth of immortality. Another censor is certain
that the book is an attempt to bring down the whole system of serfdom. A third
censor fulminates that if we let this book be printed, why, people will get bad
ideas: they’ll start going out and buying dead souls themselves [they already,
by the way, were doing so! See above], while a fourth declares that the sum
charged for dead souls in the book is minuscule; after all, these are human
souls that once lived, existed! We depict people selling them for two and a
half rubles, and after that not a single foreigner will ever want to visit our benighted
country again!
Some critics suspect that such
a meeting of the censors was never even held (see Mann, p. 114), and that Gogol
let his comic genius run wild when describing that nonexistent meeting in his
letter to Pletnyov. I believe it. This is just too good, too much like a scene
out of THE INSPECTOR GENERAL. Gogol made
it all up in his febrile imagination.
Gogol’s last great work, DEAD
SOULS (Vol. I) is a novel written while making promises about a still better
novel, while already straining ahead, making notes and plotting out scenes for
that BETTER novel, the one that would turn the whole universe up on its ear and
would, as Gogol said, “solve the riddle of my existence.” The first volume was
published in 1842. After that, Gogol spent years wandering around Europe again, trying to write a sequel. During this time it
became obvious (probably even to Gogol himself, who was awash in delusions of
grandeur) that he had made too many grandiose promises about where he would
take his dead souls. Now he even began criticizing the only published volume of
DEAD SOULS, declaring that he could have got the thing right, had he worked it
over to his satisfaction.
As the impossibility of his
religious mission became ever more apparent, Gogol’s health declined. No one
has ever clearly diagnosed his ailments. He often complained of problems with
his stomach, of hemorrhoids and digestive disorders. For years he acted like a hypochondriac.
It seems obvious that some chronic nervous condition contributed to his
physical illnesses. He could only feel well if his writing was going well, and,
unfortunately, after the publication of Vol. I of his “poem,” the writing
seldom went well. The nervous illness flared up in June, 1840, then again in
the winter and spring of 1845. At that time, in the midst of another frantic
flurry of travel around Europe, Gogol wrote (May, 1845) to I.I. Bazarov, the
Father Superior of the Russian Orthodox Church in Germany, as follows: “Come to
me and give me the sacrament; I’m dying.” Shortly after this he burned the
manuscript for the second volume of his novel. There were several burnings, and
each was associated with emotional problems (see, e.g., Mann, p. 85-86,
219-220).
Since May, 1842, Gogol had
been writing his friends about his intention to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the Holy
Sepulcher of Jesus Christ. At first he thought he would put this off until he
finished the second volume of DEAD SOULS. The pilgrimage would be the crowning
event of his personal life, after the triumph of his life as a writer. Eventually
he went anyway (early 1848), aware probably that he would never finish the “poem.”
He derived little religious inspiration, however, from his visit to the Holy
Land, and he returned to Russia
disillusioned.
Gogol wrote a series of
admonitory letters to friends in the last ten years of his life. Some of these
were eventually published in SELECTED PASSAGES FROM LETTERS TO FRIENDS (1847).
In reading many of these letters today, you sense an air of derangement. They
manifest none of the Gogolian lightness of tone, none of the comic genius that
shows up, almost automatically, in his best fiction. These are letters composed
by a sort of monk, a writer who had come to believe that his own genius for
comedy was of the devil.
The definitive act came on
the night of Feb. 11, 1852, in Moscow.
In the fireplace at his quarters (in the house of Count A.P. Tolstoy, today a museum devoted to
Gogol), the writer burned his whole manuscript for Vol. II of DEAD SOULS. Then,
returning to his room, he crossed himself, lay on the sofa and burst into
tears. By this time he was keeping the Orthodox fast periods religiously,
eating no meat during the Lenten Fast, seldom eating fish. At some point he seems
to have made the decision that if the poem could not be completed, then it was
time to die. He stopped eating practically anything, and, in effect, he committed
suicide by starving himself to death. Nikolai Gogol died on Feb. 21, 1852. He
was just shy of forty-three years old.
What did he leave us, those
who still read him two hundred years after the year of his birth? To enumerate
just the high points: he left us the greatest play in the history of Russian
literature and one of the greatest comic plays ever written anywhere: THE
INSPECTOR GENERAL. He left us one of the greatest short stories of world
literature, “The Overcoat.” Some consider this the greatest story in Russian
literature. And then there is that one volume of what, eventually, was supposed
to be three, the book within which he waged war with himself and (inevitably)
lost that war: DEAD SOULS.
After the final burning in
1852, after his death, friends of Gogol found some drafts stuffed back in a
cabinet. These chapters were eventually published as Part II of DEAD SOULS (in
1855). But it is a mistake to take drafts left behind and publish them as the
genuine thing. All we really have of DEAD SOULS is Vol. I. We should call this
(and only this) DEAD SOULS. The uncompleted drafts should be left for the
lucubrations of literary scholars. The reader, even the most intelligent
reader, will do better to concentrate only on DEAD SOULS.
Of course, Gogol failed in
his effort to write a work of fiction that would explain the meaning of life.
No work of fiction can do that. But DEAD SOULS (Vol. 1, the only volume) is not
a failure; it is a creative masterpiece, the work of a comic genius. What makes
it a masterpiece? Ah, there’s the rub. We cannot give a definitive answer to
that question, because artistic literature resists being defined. Artistic
literature expands out in all directions, opens itself up to a variety of
interpretations. Here, however, are a few questions posed by hypothetical puzzled
readers. My answers are based on the spirit of the book itself and on the
opinions of various critics.
FAQ
(1)
What is the plot
of DEAD SOULS?
Well,
it’s about this swindler, Chichikov, who is traveling around provincial Russian
buying up the rights to dead peasants, and then he ends up driving into a
certain town, where two “Russian muzhiks,” who are lollygagging outside a
tavern, take note of the wheel on his chaise as he drives in. “You reckon that
wheel, with a little bit of luck, would make it to Moscow?” says one of the
peasants. “Yeah, I figure it would,” replies to other. “But, way I see it, it
wouldn’t make Kazan,” said the first, and the
other agreed: “Not Kazan,
no way.” This scene has no relevance until hundreds of pages later, when
Chichikov is in a panic to flee the town, and the chaise (including that bad
wheel) is in no shape to travel. As for the provincial town itself, well, everybody
who lives there (I mean everybody) is double-dealing, corrupt, vacuous. In the
first chapters Chichikov makes a series of visits to local landowners, buying
up their dead souls. One of them (Korobochka), by the way, had a blacksmith who
died of spontaneous combustion, and then, much later, back in town, the public
prosecutor, who is notable only for one beetling brow and a blinking eye,
suddenly dies of fear (over all the wild crescendo of gossip generated by
Chichikov’s interest in dead souls), and then we find out (for the first time)
that the prosecutor himself had a soul (now that he has “given up the ghost”),
since he certainly manifested no evidence of a soul before he died, plus which
an old shameful episode, long swept under the rug, comes to light again,
concerning some merchants from Solvychegodsk, who had come to town for a fair, then
had thrown a party for some friends, merchants from Oostsysolsk, and, of course
the whole thing ended up in a knock-down-drag-out brawl, and all the poor
Oostsysolsk merchants ended up dead, but not before their outsized fists had inflicted
enormous damage on the Solvychegodsk merchants (one of whom had his “kisser
smashed all out of kilter),” etc., etc., etc.
So
much for the plot. Gogol’s method sometimes recalls that of Sterne in his
masterpiece of digression and irrelevant detail, TRISTRAM SHANDY. “Gogol’s
prose seems ripe to bursting with too many other preoccupations to bother about
plot.”[xx]
(2)
What is the theme
of DEAD SOULS?
“The
theme at its broadest is the amorphousness, characterlessness, purposelessness,
senselessness, alternately ludicrous and ominious, of life—specifically Russian
life in the first place—as material for a novelist.”[xxi]
(3)
Huh? You mean
THAT’S what the book is about?
Well,
the book is metafiction: a book about itself, “a book written about how it is
written.”[xxii] The
author gets in a brichka (traveling chaise) with his main character
Chichikov, and they travel around Russia. The reader of the book tags
along with them as well. Chichikov buys dead souls, while the author describes
nature, gets into lofty moods, soars off into the ether in an attempt to escape
the muck and mud puddles of Russian reality (but his character, Chichikov,
keeps grabbing him by the leg and pulling him back down to earth),
sentimentalizes over lost youth (or is this a parody of such sentimental
passages?), exalts his country and its future (is he serious about this, in a
book full of grotesquely negative characters and Russian sleaze, all presented
in wildly comic prose?), talks about how he’s writing his book, while,
simultaneously, promising his reader that the next volume, and the one after
that, will be much better than the one he’s writing now. Then, at the end of
the book, not knowing what else to do, the author and Chichikov rise up in the
air in their troika (they leave room for the reader in that brichka too).
They/we all fly like birds, out of the book, in a swirl of exalted rhetoric,
while foreigners stand by open-mouthed and gape, flabbergasted, at whatever
this is (the future glory of Russia?).
(4)
Yeah… Okay… But
what does the title mean? What are dead souls?
The
title is all-expansive, and dead souls are just about anything you may want to
make them. One creative critic (Nabokov, p. 73) says that Chichikov is a
traveling salesman from Hades. Satan employs him to journey around the Russian
realm, buying up or collecting human souls. He takes both living souls and dead
souls, but then, Gogol makes it clear that there’s no real way of
distinguishing a living soul from a dead soul. In fact, the most ALIVE
characters in the novel, the most vibrant, are the dead peasants (souls) that
are reanimated in (first) Sobakevich’s imagination and (later) in Chichikov’s.
Who’s dead and who’s alive? What’s really real and what is fictional about this
life we live? God knows. After all, how can anybody claim that he/she has a
grip on “life,” when we don’t know where we came from, and we don’t know where
we’re going (and when), and we don’t really even have more than a tentative
grasp on what we’re supposed to do while we’re here! And, speaking of God, YOU,
reader, are a dead soul too, so it’s time to think about getting right with the
Lord!
(5)
Why does Gogol
insert the story about Captain Kopeikin? You know, the tale that the postmaster
tells near the end? About this veteran of the fight against Napoleon? Who
returns to Russia minus one arm and one leg and tries to get some kind of
pension and then, when they refuse him his pension, he becomes a one-armed,
one-legged highwayman, and who is, in the opinion of the postmaster, none other
than Chichikov himself (until somebody mentions that Chichikov has two arms and
two legs, and the postmaster slaps himself on the forehead and calls himself a
goose). Others in the town, meanwhile, have decided that Chichikov is really
Napoleon in disguise, or the Antichrist. Hoping to learn the truth about
Chichikov, and nothing but the truth, the town officials finally decide to
consult the most unreliable source around, the compulsive liar Nozdryov, who
lies and does nothing but lie, for the sheer joy of fabrication.
Why
Kopeikin? Well, I don’t know, but Gogol did insist on leaving this part in the
book when the censors wanted it out; his artistic side knew that we couldn’t do
without Kopeikin. I don’t think that Gogol himself knew why, though. Anyway,
“The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” is wonderful!
This is enough to give those
who have not read DEAD SOULS the incentive to begin. Among the readers who have
NOT yet read DEAD SOULS, by the way, are most Russians, who have the book
foisted upon them in school, where it is most often presented by unimaginative
and deadly boring teachers of Russian literature. A good palliative to such pedagogues
is provided by the best critics who have studied the intricate novel/poem. Many
of them are mentioned in my endnotes, but I would like to make special mention
of the great Yury Mann, who has spent over forty years writing articles and
books on Gogol, and, as far as I know, is still at it.
For all that, however, you
have to do it by yourself, reader. You have to get in there and engage with the
Master, Nikolai Vasil’evich. Don’t worry if you can’t read Russian. True,
Gogol’s skewed style is almost impossible to translate with exactitude, but
enough of the skewiness, and the artistic genius, comes through in a good
translation.[xxiii]
You’ll have to read slowly.
Gogol’s style is not exactly modern or minimalist. Try reading Melville’s
MOBY-DICK first; that would be good preparation. One last thing: don’t forget
to laugh while you’re at it. Gogol, the real Gogol (the artistic genius) wanted
his reader laughing as he/she rode through an imaginary Russia with the author/narrator and
Chichikov in a brichka. Though he himself may not have been totally aware of
this, Gogol (at least one side of him) even wanted his reader laughing the
unbridled, soul-bracing folk laughter that Bakhtin has described.
[i] There is
a picture of the new Nose
Monument in Russian
Life (Mar.-Apr., 2009); see contents page. This statue is located on the
grounds of St. Petersburg University. As of this writing the original nose
monument (a bas relief consisting of a pair of huge nostrils and labeled “Mayor
Kovalyov’s Nose”) is still there on the street corner in St. Petersburg. It is,
apparently, the work of V. Bukchaev, and was first stuck up on the façade of a
building in 1994 or 1995.
[ii]
Bakhtin’s book is TVORCHESTVO FRANCOIS RABELAIS i NARODNAJA KULTURA
SREDNEVEKOV’JA i RENNESSANSA (Moscow,
1965). There is an English translation by Helene Iswolsky, RABELAIS AND HIS
WORLD (M.I.T. Press, 1968 and Indiana University Press, 1965). I have quoted
here from an excerpt, “Verbal Art and the Folk Culture of Laughter,” in Nikolai
Gogol, DEAD SOULS (Norton Critical Edition, 1985), p. 569-577.
[iii]
Another of Stalin’s favorite games was to leave a writer on tenterhooks.
Instead of arresting him immediately, he played games with him, leaving him to
sweat in the sleepless nights, never knowing when they were coming for him.
Mikhail Bulgakov, one of whose plays Stalin liked, was such a writer.
[iv] Johan
Huizinga, HOMO LUDENS: A STUDY OF THE PLAY ELEMENT IN CULTURE (Boston: The Beacon
Press, 1950), p. 119, 192, 189.
[v] Some of
this spirit came into Russia
by way of pictorial art and architecture, e.g., the Russian Baroque. A good
example of lightness and irony in St. Petersburg
architecture is the pseudo-Gothic Chesmenskaja tserkov’ (Çesme Church),
a small airy structure built 1777-1780.
[vi] D.J.
Richards, “Wit and Worship—Two Impulses in Modern Russian Literature,” Russian
Literature Triquarterly, No. 14 (Winter, 1976), p. 8, 10-11.
[vii] Ivan
Bunin, the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature
(1933), is very much (in Richards’ formulation) a “worshipper.” Bunin once
called Nabokov, his younger émigré colleague, “the red-headed clown in the
circus.” See Ivan Bunin, NIGHT OF DENIAL, translated by R. Bowie (Northwestern
University Press, 2006), p. 682, 704.
[viii] Cited
in Yu. Mann, V POISKAKH ZHIVOJ DUSHI: “MERTVYE DUSHI” [IN SEARCH OF A LIVING
SOUL: “DEAD SOULS”] (Moscow: “Kniga,” 1984), p. 253.
[ix]
Vsevolod Setchkarev, GOGOL: HIS LIFE AND WORKS, translated from the German by
Robert Kramer (New York University, 1965), p. 5, 8. Vladimir Nabokov, NIKOLAI
GOGOL (N.Y.: New Directions, 1944). On the way Nabokov purports to write a book
about Gogol, while simultaneously espousing his own artistic principles, see
Robert Bowie, “Nabokov’s Influence on Gogol,” JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE, 13
(July, 1986), p. 251-66.
[x] When I
say he was an intuitive writer, I am not implying that the words just flowed
out on the page, from some magic spot in Gogol’s brain, and what flowed out was
already art. Gogol the artist was a perfectionist; he wrote and rewrote his
fictions over and over, altering, polishing, re-writing, polishing.
[xi] Cited
in the Bakhtin excerpt, “Verbal Art and the Folk Culture of Laughter,” in
Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS, p. 572.
[xii] It is
axiomatic in Russian literary criticism to point out the oddness (sometimes
even incorrectness) of Gogol’s style. In the passage I cite here lofty laughter
is compared to the actions of a medieval folk jester who is pulling silly
faces. This is a stylistic solecism: comparing apples to oranges. Russian
émigrés have often stressed the impossibility of translating Gogol’s skewed
Russian. The above passage reads as follows in Russian: “ibo ne priznayot
sovremmennyj sud, chto vysokyj vostorzhennyj smekh dostoin stat’ rjadom s
vysokim liricheskim dvizhen’em i chto tselaja propast’ mezhdu nim i krivljan’em
balagannogo skomorokha!” (from COLLECTED WORKS IN SEVEN VOLUMES, Vol. 5, Moscow, 1967, p. 157).
[xiii] V.G.
Belinsky cited in Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS, p. 455. For the
Russian, see Mann, p. 156.
[xiv] For
those who have not read the novel: the plot centers upon a kind of picaresque.
The anti-hero Chichikov, a swindler, shows up in a provincial town. He is
journeying around Russia,
seeking to buy up the legal rights to peasants who still exist on paper (until
the next census is taken), but who have died (who are dead peasants, called
“dead souls”). He hopes to take out a mortgage on some property in a remote
province, using the dead souls as collateral.
[xv] V.V.
Gippius cited in Norton Critical Edition, p. 490. Vasilij Gippius is one of the
most perceptive critics of Gogol. His book, GOGOL’, originally printed by the
“Mysl’ Press (Leningrad,
1924) was reissued in the Brown University Slavic Reprint Series in 1963, 1966
(in Russian).
[xvi] Cited
in Juryj Mann, V POISKAKH ZHIVOJ DUSHI, p. 7.
[xvii] “An
Author’s Confession” (Avtorskaja ispoved’) is an arbitrary title for a document
published posthumously (1855). The original manuscript was untitled. Gogol’
wrote these materials in May-June, 1847, at the time early comments on his
SELECTED PASSAGES FROM CORRESPONDENCE WITH FRIENDS had begun appearing. See
COLLECTED WORKS IN SEVEN VOLUMES, Vol. VI (Moscow, 1967), p. 588.
[xviii]
Gippius is especially good at showing the novel as more than word play and
scintillating wit. He discusses in some detail the satire and the topical
themes. See, e.g., the Norton Critical Edition, p. 494, 506-07.
[xix] Donald
Fanger, THE CREATION OF NIKOLAI GOGOL (Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 231.
The citation in Russian is from a letter that Gogol’s friend Zhukovsky wrote to
Aleksandra Smirnova, January 4, 1845.
[xx] John
Bayley, “Under the Overcoat,” NEW
YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, March 18, 1999, p. 24.
[xxi] Donald
Fanger, THE CREATION OF NIKOLAI GOGOL.
[xxii] Andrej
Sinjavksij, V TENI GOGOL’JA [IN GOGOL’S SHADOW] (Paris: 1975).
[xxiii] The
Norton Critical Edition of DEAD SOULS (edited by George Gibian, translation by
George Reavey) is especially valuable for the reader of English, in that it
includes background sources (among them, some of Gogol’s wackiest letters) and
selections from many of the best critics.
