The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (59 page)

“Among the aristocracy of the time, a young man from one of the best families soon drew everyone’s eyes, who distinguished himself in the government service while still young—an ardent admirer of everything genuine and lofty, a zealot of everything produced by human art and intellect, a promising Maecenas.
He soon deserved to be distinguished by the empress herself, who entrusted him with an important post that agreed perfectly with his own expectations, a post in which he could do much for learning and for the good in general.
The young courtier surrounded himself with painters, poets, scholars.
He wanted to give work to all, to encourage all.
He undertook at his own expense a great many useful publications, commissioned a great many things, announced encouraging awards, spent heaps of money on it, and in the end was ruined.
Yet, full of magnanimous impulse, he did not want to abandon his cause, sought to borrow everywhere, and turned at last to the famous moneylender.
Having taken a considerable loan from him, in a short period of time the man changed completely: he became an enemy, a persecutor of developing minds and talents.
In all writings he began to see the bad
side, he twisted the meaning of every phrase.
As luck would have it, the French Revolution occurred just then.
This suddenly served him as a tool for every possible nastiness.
He began to see some sort of revolutionary trend in everything, he imagined allusions everywhere.
He became suspicious to such a degree that he finally began to suspect his own self, started writing terrible, unjust denunciations, made innumerable people miserable.
It goes without saying that such behavior could not fail in the end to reach the throne.
The magnanimous empress was horrified and, filled with that nobility of soul which is the adornment of crowned heads, spoke words which, though they could not have been conveyed to us exactly, yet imprinted their deep meaning in the hearts of many.
The empress observed that it is not under monarchy that the lofty, noble impulses of the soul are suppressed, it is not there that works of intellect, poetry, and art are scorned and persecuted; that, on the contrary, only monarchs patronize them; that the Shakespeares and Molières flourished under their magnanimous rule, while Dante could not find himself a corner in his republican fatherland; that true geniuses emerge in times of the splendor and power of sovereigns and states, and not at times of outrageous political phenomena and republican terrors, which up to now have never presented the world with a single poet; that poets and artists ought to be held in distinction, for they bring only peace and a beautiful quiet to the soul, not agitation and murmuring; that scholars, poets, and all those who produce art are pearls and diamonds in the imperial crown: by them the epoch of a great sovereign is adorned and acquires still greater splendor.
In short, the empress, at the moment of speaking these words, was divinely beautiful.
I remember that old people couldn’t speak of it without tears.
Everyone became concerned with the affair.
To the credit of our national pride, it must be noted that there always dwells in the Russian heart a beautiful impulse to take the side of the oppressed.
The courtier who had betrayed his trust was duly punished and dismissed from his post.
But in the faces of his compatriots he read a much greater punishment.
This was a decided and universal scorn.
It is impossible to describe how the vain soul suffered; pride, disappointed
ambition, ruined hopes all joined together, and in fits of terrible madness and rage his life broke off.

“Another spectacular example also occurred before everyone’s eyes.
Among the beauties of whom there was no lack in our northern capital, one decidedly held primacy over the rest.
She was some miraculous blend of our northern beauty with Mediterranean beauty, a diamond that rarely occurs in the world.
My father used to confess that he had never in his life seen anything like her.
It seemed that everything came together in her: wealth, intelligence, and inner charm.
She had a crowd of wooers, and the most remarkable of them was Prince R., the noblest, the best of all young men, beautiful both in looks and in his chivalrous, magnanimous impulses—the lofty ideal of novels and women, a Grandison
²¹
in all respects.
Prince R.
was passionately and madly in love with her; and he was reciprocated with the same burning love.
But her family thought the match unequal.
The prince’s hereditary estates had long ceased to belong to him, his family was in disgrace, and the poor state of his affairs was known to everyone.
Suddenly the prince leaves the capital for a time, supposedly in order to straighten out his affairs, and a short while later he reappears surrounded with unbelievable magnificence and splendor.
Brilliant balls and banquets make him known at court.
The beauty’s father turns favorable, and in town a most interesting wedding takes place.
Whence came such a change and the bridegroom’s unheard-of wealth—that certainly no one could explain; but people murmured on the side that he had entered into certain conditions with the incomprehensible moneylender and taken a loan from him.
Be that as it may, the wedding occupied the whole town.
Both bride and groom were objects of general envy.
Everybody knew of their ardent, constant love, the long languishing suffered on both sides, the high merits of both.
Fiery women described beforehand the paradisal bliss that the young spouses were going to enjoy.
But it all turned out otherwise.
Within a year, a terrible change took place in the husband.
His character, hitherto noble and beautiful, was poisoned by the venom of suspicious jealousy, intolerance, and inexhaustible caprices.
He became a tyrant
and tormentor of his wife and—something no one could have foreseen—resorted to the most inhuman acts, even to beating.
Within a year, no one could recognize the woman who so recently had shone and attracted crowds of obedient admirers.
At last, unable to endure her hard lot any longer, she made the first mention of divorce.
Her husband flew into a fury at the very thought of it.
On a first violent impulse, he burst into her room with a knife in his hand and undoubtedly would have stabbed her then and there had he not been seized and held back.
In a fit of frenzy and despair, he turned the knife against himself—and in the most terrible sufferings ended his life.

“Besides these two examples, which happened before the eyes of the whole of society, a great many were told of which had occurred in the lower classes, almost all of them having a terrible end.
Here an honest, sober man became a drunkard; there a merchant’s salesclerk stole from his employer; there a cabby, after several years of honest work, put a knife into a client over a penny.
It was impossible that these occurrences, sometimes told with additions, should fail to bring some sort of involuntary terror to the humble inhabitants of Kolomna.
No one doubted the presence of unclean powers in this man.
It was said that he offered hair-raising terms, such as no unfortunate man ever dared repeat to anyone afterwards; that his money had a burning quality, that it became red-hot by itself and bore some strange signs … in short, there was a great deal of every sort of absurd talk.
And the remarkable thing was that this whole Kolomna populace, this whole world of poor old women, minor officials, minor artists, and, in short, all the small fry we’ve just named, agreed to suffer and endure the last extremity rather than turn to the dreadful moneylender; old women were even found dead of starvation, preferring the death of their bodies to the destruction of their souls.
Those who met him in the street felt an involuntary fear.
A passer-by would cautiously back away and glance behind him for a long time afterwards, watching his immensely tall figure disappear in the distance.
His appearance alone held so much of the extraordinary that it would have made anyone ascribe a supernatural existence to him.
The strong features, more deeply chiseled than ever happens in a
man; the hot, bronze complexion; the immense thickness of the eyebrows, the unbearably frightening eyes, even the loose folds of his Asian clothing—all seemed to say that the passions of others all paled before the passion that moved in his body My father, each time he met him, would stand motionless, and each time could not help saying: ‘The devil, the very devil!’ But I must hasten to acquaint you with my father, who, incidentally, is the real subject of this story.

“My father was a man remarkable in many respects.
He was an artist such as few are, one of those wonders that Russia alone brings forth from her inexhaustible womb, a self-taught artist who found rules and laws in his own soul, without teachers or school, driven only by his thirst for perfection, and following, for reasons perhaps unknown to himself, no path but that which his own soul indicated—one of those natural-born wonders whom contemporaries often abuse with the offensive word ‘ignoramus’ and whom the castigations of others and their own failures do not cool down but only lend new zeal and strength, so that in their souls they go far beyond the works that earned them the title of ‘ignoramus.’ With lofty inner instinct, he sensed the presence of a thought in every object; he grasped the true meaning of the term ‘historical painting’ on his own; grasped why a simple head, a simple portrait by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Correggio, could be called a historical painting, and why a huge picture on a historical subject remained a
tableau de genre
, despite all the artist’s claim to historical painting.
Both inner sense and personal conviction turned his brush to Christian subjects, the highest and last step of the sublime.
He had none of the ambition or irritability so inseparable from the character of many artists.
He was of firm character, an honest, direct, even crude man, covered on the outside with a somewhat tough bark, not without a certain pride in his soul, who spoke of people at once sharply and condescendingly.
‘Why look at them?’ he used to say.
‘I don’t work for them.
I won’t take my works to their drawing rooms, they’ll be put in a church.
Whoever understands me will be grateful—if not, they’ll pray to God anyway.
There’s no point in blaming a man of society for not understanding painting: he understands cards instead, he can appreciate
good wine, horses—why should a gentleman know more than that?
Otherwise he’ll take up one thing or another, turn smart, and then there’ll be no getting rid of him!
To each his own; let everybody tend to his affairs.
As I see it, he’s a better man who says outright that he doesn’t understand than one who plays the hypocrite, saying he knows something when he doesn’t and simply mucking everything up.’ He worked for little money—that is, just for what he needed to support his family and give him the chance to work.
Besides that, he never refused to help others or give a helping hand to a poor artist.
He had the simple, pious faith of his ancestors, and that may be why the lofty expression which brilliant talents were never able to achieve appeared of itself on the faces he portrayed.
In the end, through the constancy of his labors and his steadfastness on the path he had marked out for himself, he began to gain respect even on the part of those who had abused him as an ignoramus and a homemade talent.
He was constantly given commissions by the Church and was never without work.
One of his works occupied him greatly.
I no longer remember what the subject was, I know only that he had to include the spirit of darkness in the picture.
He thought for a long time about what image to give him; he wanted to realize in his face all that burdens and oppresses man.
As he reflected thus, the image of the mysterious moneylender sometimes passed through his head, and he would think involuntarily, ‘There’s the one I should paint the devil after.’ Consider his astonishment, then, when one day, as he was working in his studio, he heard a knock at the door and immediately afterwards the terrible moneylender came in.
He could not help feeling some inner tremor, which passed involuntarily through his whole body.

“ ‘You are an artist?’ he said to my father, without any ceremony.

“ ‘An artist,’ my father said in perplexity, waiting for what would follow.

“ ‘Very well.
Paint my portrait.
I may die soon.
I have no children, but I do not want to die altogether, I want to live on.
Can you paint my portrait as if it were perfectly alive?’

“My father thought, ‘What could be better?
He’s inviting himself to be the devil in my painting.’ He gave his word.
They
arranged the time and the price, and the next day my father seized his palette and brushes and went to him.
The high courtyard, the dogs, the iron doors and bars, the arched windows, the coffers covered with strange carpets, and, finally, the extraordinary host himself, who sat motionless before him—all this made a strange impression on him.
The windows, as if by design, were blocked up and encumbered below, so that light came only from above.
‘Devil take it, how well his face is lighted now!’ he said to himself, and he began to paint greedily, as if fearing that the fortunate lighting might somehow disappear.
‘What force!’ he repeated to himself.
‘If I depict him even half the way he is now, he’ll kill all my saints and angels; they’ll pale beside him.
What diabolical force!
He’ll simply leap out of my canvas if I’m the least bit faithful to nature.
What extraordinary features!’ he constantly repeated, his zeal increasing, and he could already see certain features beginning to come over on canvas.
But the closer he came to them, the more he felt some heavy, anxious feeling, incomprehensible to himself.
However, despite that, he resolved to pursue every inconspicuous trait and expression with literal precision.
First of all he set to work on the eyes.
There was so much power in those eyes that it seemed impossible even to think of conveying them exactly as they were in nature.
However, he determined at all costs to search out the least detail and nuance in them, to grasp their mystery … But as soon as he began to penetrate and delve into them with his brush, there arose such a strange revulsion in his soul, such inexplicable distress, that he had to lay his brush aside for a time and then begin again.
In the end he could no longer endure it, he felt that these eyes had pierced his soul and produced an inconceivable anxiety in it.
The next day, and the third, it became still stronger.
He felt frightened.
He threw down his brush and declared flatly that he was no longer able to paint him.
You should have seen the change these words produced in the strange moneylender.
He fell at his feet and beseeched him to finish the portrait, saying that his fate and his existence in the world depended on it, that he had already touched his living features with his brush, and that if he conveyed them faithfully, his life by some supernatural force would be retained in the portrait, that through it he would not die entirely, and that he
had to be present in the world.
My father felt horrified by these words: they seemed so strange and frightening to him that he threw down both brushes and palette and rushed headlong from the room.