The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (2 page)

So it was with the help of his mother’s memory, plus a few books of local history and old Ukrainian epic songs, that Gogol set about creating the Little Russia of
Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka
and
Mirgorod.

It is a world of proud, boastful Cossacks, of black-browed beauties, of witches, devils, magic spells and enchantments, of drowsy farms and muddy little towns—that is, a stage-set Ukraine, more operatic than real.
Holidays and feasting are always close by—in “St.
John’s Eve” and “The Night Before Christmas” obviously, but also in the wedding that begins “The Terrible Vengeance,” in the banqueting that runs through the
Mirgorod
tales and appears again in “The Carriage,” a perfect little anecdote that belongs to this same world.
Festive occasions grant special privileges; on festive nights fates are revealed or decided, lovers are separated, enemies are brought together; the natural and the supernatural mingle for good or ill, for comic or horrific effect.
The expanded possibilities
of festive reality justified the freedom with which Gogol constructed his narratives.
But of the real peasant, of conditions under serfdom, of Ukrainian society and its conflicts at the time, there is no more trace in Gogol’s tales, even those of the most realistic cast, than there was in his father’s comedies.
His characters, as Michel Aucouturier notes in the preface to his French translation of
Evenings
, “are not typical representatives of the Little Russian peasantry, but the young lovers and old greybeards of the theater, Ukrainian descendants of the Cléantes and Elises, the Orgons and Gérontes of Molière.”

The more surprising is the reputation Gogol acquired early, among both conservatives and liberals, as a painter of reality, the founder of the “natural school.” Gogol’s appearance in Russian literature was so enigmatic that it seems his first critics (Pushkin excepted), while they liked what they read, could not account for their liking of it and invented reasons that were simply beside the point.
The real reason was no doubt the unusual texture of Gogol’s writing.
His prose is a self-conscious artistic medium that mimics the popular manner but in fact represents something other, something quite alien to the old art of storytelling.

In his essay “The Storyteller” (1936), Walter Benjamin wrote: “Experience passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.” And he noted further that “every real story … contains, openly or covertly, something useful.
The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim.
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.… Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.” If we turn to Gogol’s tales with such words as “experience,” “practical advice,” “counsel,” and “wisdom” in mind, we will see that they are total strangers to the “real story” as Benjamin defines it.
Memory is the medium of storytelling, both in the experience that is passed on from mouth to mouth and in the storyteller’s act of telling, which is always a retelling.
Though he may vary the tale each time he tells it, he will insist that he is faithfully repeating what he heard from earlier storytellers; otherwise it would be something made up, a fiction, a lie.
Memory is the storyteller’s
authority, the Muse-derived element of his art.
He has the whole tale, the plot, the sequence of events, even the embellishments, in mind before he tells it.
Gogol, we might say, has nothing in mind.
Memory plays no part in his work.
He does not know where the act of writing will lead him.
In other words, he belongs not to the order of tradition but to the order of invention.
And his best inventions come to him in the writing; he happens upon them—Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka’s dream, for instance, which is so unexpected and so transcends the rest of the story that he simply breaks off after it.
Hence his way of proceeding by digressions, which often turn out to be the main point of the tale; hence his scorn for the accepted rules of art—unity of action, logical development, formal coherence—and his avoidance of “meaning” and motivation.
The discovery of the unaccountable, of the absence of an experience to be passed on, left him permanently surprised.
His work was the invention of forms to express it.

If we take what might seem the most traditional of Gogol’s tales—“The Terrible Vengeance,” for example, or “Viy” (which Gogol calls a “folk legend” and claims to retell almost as simply as he heard it)—we will see that their procedure is precisely antitraditional.
“The Terrible Vengeance,” far from being a naive epic tale of Cossack life, is a studied imitation of the epic manner, a conscious experiment in rhythmic prose, with inevitable elements of parody and a quite unconvincing pathos.
No folktale or epic song would end with what amounts to its own prologue, explaining the action after the fact.
The structure is highly artificial and peculiarly Gogolian (it occurs again in “The Portrait” and in the first part of
Dead Souls
), showing his concern with the act of composition and his unconcern with meaning.
So, too, in folktales about Ivan the Fool, the hero traditionally undergoes three tests and wins the beautiful daughter in the end.
Gogol’s “Viy” belongs to the same general type, but the daughter is hardly a prize, and the hero, Khoma Brut, comes to a sorry and quite untraditional end.
What
makes
these stories are countless unpredictable incidents, details, and turns of phrase scattered along the way, and such bravura passages as the famous description of the Dnieper River in “The Terrible Vengeance,” the erotic rendering of Khoma Brut’s flight with
the witch, and the tremendous finale of the tale with the appearance out of nowhere of the monster Viy (who, incidentally, has no source in folklore; he is Gogol’s creature and appears literally out of nowhere).

Of this untraditional procedure Sinyavsky writes:

 … the accent shifts from the object of speech to speech as a process of objectless intent, interesting in itself and exhausted by itself.
Information that is a priori contentless shifts our attention from the material to the means of its verbal organization.
Speech about useless objects enters consciousness as a thing, as a ponderable mass, as a fact of language valuable in itself.
That is why we perceive Gogol’s prose so distinctly as prose, and not as a habitual manner and generally accepted form of putting thoughts into words, nor as an appendix to the content and subject of the story.
It has its content and even, if you wish, its subject in itself—this prose which steps forth in the free image of speech about facts not worth mentioning, speech in a pure sense
about nothing.

If there is still a mimicry of traditional storytelling in a number of the earlier Ukrainian tales, in others we see much more clearly this shift to “a process of objectless intent,” to “speech … 
about nothing
”—particularly in “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” the last written of the
Evenings
, and in “Old World Landowners” and “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” from
Mirgorod.
The element of the supernatural that triggers events in the other Ukrainian tales is almost entirely absent from “Shponka” and “Landowners.” Almost, but not quite: Shponka’s dream of the multiplying wife, and the she-cat that precipitates the end of the otherwise endless banality of the landowners’ existence, are decisive incursions of the supernatural, or the other-natural, into the idyllic placidity of Little Russian farm life.
In the story of the two Ivans, however, nothing of the sort happens, and the quarrel of the two friends proves unresolvable.
The narrator ends with a dispirited exclamation: “It’s dull in this world, gentlemen!” Beneath the unbroken surface of this banal local
anecdote (there was in fact such an inseparable, litigious pair living in the town of Mirgorod) some extraordinary transformation should be about to happen, some new reality should be about to appear.
For Gogol, the non-occurrence of this transformation became the most “supernatural” subject of all.
He developed it in
Dead Souls.

In the Petersburg tales the unaccountable sits squarely in the midst of things, like Major Kovalev’s nose in the barber’s loaf of bread.
“Petersburg has no character,” Gogol wrote to his mother in 1829, “the foreigners fattening themselves here no longer resemble foreigners, and the Russians in turn have become some sort of foreigners here and are no longer either the one or the other.” Where identity is so fluid, memory finds nothing to grasp, no experience is durable enough to be passed on.
The phantasmal Petersburg of later Russian literature—of Dostoevsky, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely—made its first appearance in “Nevsky Prospect,” the idea for which came to Gogol as early as 1831, when he wrote down some sketches of the Petersburg landscape.
It is a landscape of mists, pale colors, dim light, the opposite of his native province, and peopled mainly by government officials of various ranks, among whom Gogol singled out a certain type of petty clerk, the “eternal titular councillor”—Mr.
Poprishchin of “The Diary of a Madman,” Akaky Akakievich of “The Overcoat”—a type that became as perennial in Russian literature as the phantasmal city that somehow exudes him but will not house him.

Nothing stands still on Nevsky Prospect.
People of various ranks appear, disappear, reappear in other guises, changing constantly with the light.
“The deceptive nature of reality,” as Sinyavsky notes, “is nowhere so openly and declaredly expressed by Gogol as in ‘Nevsky Prospect.’ It is not by chance that ‘Nevsky Prospect’ sets the tone for the other Petersburg tales.” The unusual structure of the tale underscores the theme, framing two opposite cases of deception with a more general evocation of the city’s atmosphere.
Interestingly, in a note published in
The Contemporary
, Pushkin (who did not live to read “The Overcoat”) called “Nevsky Prospect” the fullest, the most complete of Gogol’s tales.

The order of ranks is also revealed in these tales as a deception, a
pure fiction.
Major Kovalev, hero of “The Nose,” is a “collegiate assessor made in the Caucasus,” meaning made rather quickly.
He was “made” rather recently, as well, and is still quite proud of his advancement.
One day his nose disappears and then turns up “by himself” in the street wearing the uniform of a state councillor, a civil-service rank roughly equivalent to the military rank of general.
Major Kovalev is not even sure of the proper way to address him.
The fiction of ranks is also at the center of “The Diary of a Madman.” Here, for instance, the awarding of a decoration is described from the family dog’s point of view.
The dog notices that her usually taciturn master has begun talking to himself, saying, “Will I get it or won’t I?” over and over again.
A week later he comes home very happy:

All morning gentlemen in uniforms kept coming to him, congratulating him for something.
At the table he was merrier than I’d ever seen him before, told jokes, and after dinner he held me up to his neck and said: “Look, Medji, what’s this?” I saw some little ribbon.
I sniffed it but found decidedly no aroma; finally I licked it on the sly: it was a bit salty.

The keeper of the “Diary,” Mr.
Poprishchin, also broods on the question of rank, because he is unhappily in love with his chief’s daughter, who is in love with a handsome kammerjunker:

Several times already I’ve tried to figure out where all these differences come from.
What makes me a titular councillor and why on earth am I a titular councillor?
Maybe I’m some sort of count or general and only seem to be a titular councillor?
Maybe I myself don’t know who I am … can’t I be promoted this minute to governor general, or intendant, or something else like that?
I’d like to know, what makes me a titular councillor?
Why precisely a titular councillor?

In the end he decides he is the king of Spain, an act of perfect fictionizing for which he is taken off to the madhouse.

“The Diary of a Madman” is Gogol’s only first-person story,
and Mr.
Poprishchin is perhaps the most human of his characters.
For brief moments a piercing note comes into his voice, as when he asks, “Why precisely a titular councillor?” or when he calls out his last words to his mother: “Dear mother, save your poor son!
shed a tear on his sick head!
see how they torment him!
press the poor orphan to your breast!
there’s no place for him in the world!” We hear the same note, more briefly still, in the voice of that other titular councillor, Akaky Akakievich, when his fellow clerks torment him unbearably and he finally says: “Let me be.
Why do you offend me?” There is something so strange, so pitiable in his voice that one young clerk never forgets it:

And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: “Let me be.
Why do you offend me?”—and in these penetrating words rang other words: “I am your brother.” And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands.…

These moments of pathos led certain radical critics of Gogol’s time, the influential Vissarion Belinsky first among them, to see Gogol as a champion of the little man and an enemy of the existing social order.
The same view later became obligatory for Soviet critics.
But whatever semblance of social criticism or satire there may be in the Petersburg tales is secondary and incidental.
The pathos is momentary, and Gogol packs his clerks off to the madhouse or out of this world with a remarkably cool hand.

The young Dostoevsky, in his first novel,
Poor Folk
, challenged Gogol’s unfeeling treatment of his petty clerk.
Dostoevsky’s hero, Makar Devushkin, is also a titular councillor and clearly modeled on Akaky Akakievich.
He lives by the same endless copying work and suffers the same humiliating treatment from his fellow clerks.
But instead of being an automaton whose highest ideals are embodied in a new overcoat, Makar Devushkin is endowed with inner life, personal dignity, and the ability to love.
He is also a writer of sorts, concerned with developing his own style.
And he is a literary critic.
Makar Devushkin reads Gogol’s “The Overcoat”
and is offended: “And why write such things?
And why is it necessary?… Well, it’s a nasty little book … It’s simply unheard of, because it’s not even possible that there could be such a civil servant.
No, I will make a complaint … I will make a formal complaint.” Makar Devushkin shows the influence of sentimental French social novels on Russian literature of the 1840s.
Nothing could be further from the spirit of such writing than Gogol’s strange humor.
The “laughter through tears of sorrow” that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely
laughter.
The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message.
He saw the fiction of ranks not as an evil to be exposed but as an instance of the groundlessness of reality itself and of the incantatory power of words.