The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (65 page)

This incident made a strong impression on him.
He even began to say “How dare you, do you realize who is before you?” far less often to his subordinates; and if he did say it, it was not without first listening to what the matter was.
But still more remarkable was that thereafter the appearances of the dead clerk ceased altogether: evidently the general’s overcoat fitted him perfectly; at least there was no more talk about anyone having his overcoat torn off.
However, many active and concerned people refused to calm down and
kept saying that the dead clerk still appeared in the more remote parts of the city.
And, indeed, one policeman in Kolomna saw with his own eyes a phantom appear from behind a house; but, being somewhat weak by nature, so that once an ordinary adult pig rushing out of someone’s private house had knocked him down, to the great amusement of the coachmen standing around, for which jeering he extorted a half kopeck from each of them to buy snuff—so, being weak, he did not dare to stop it, but just followed it in the darkness, until the phantom suddenly turned around, stopped, and asked, “What do you want?” and shook such a fist at him as is not to be found even among the living.
The policeman said, “Nothing,” and at once turned to go back.
The phantom, however, was much taller now, had an enormous mustache, and, apparently making its way toward the Obukhov Bridge, vanished completely into the darkness of the night.

NOTES

UKRAINIAN TALES

St. John’s Eve

1.
The Russian and Ukrainian stove was a large, elaborate structure used for heating and cooking, which one could also sit or sleep on and even get into in order to wash.

2.
The names of three half-legendary heroes from Ukrainian history: Ivan Podkova was a Cossack leader who seized the Moldavian throne in 1578 and was later executed by the Polish king; Karp Poltora Kozhukha was hetman of the Ukraine from 1638 to 1642; Sagaidachny (Pyotr Konashevich), also a Ukrainian hetman, led Cossack campaigns against the Turks and Tartars in 1616–21.

3.
A Ukrainian saying, meaning to lie at confession, as Gogol himself explains in a note to the story.

4.
The Poles and Lithuanians, whose territories bordered the Ukraine, were traditional enemies of the Cossacks, though they sometimes made alliances with each other against common enemies.
The narrator refers to them in somewhat familiar, disrespectful terms.
“Crimeans” here refers to the Crimean Tartars, a Muslim people inhabiting the Crimean peninsula, descendants of the Mongols.

5.
Kutya
(pronounced koot-YAH) is a special dish made from rice (or barley or wheat) and raisins, sweetened with honey, offered to people after a church service in commemoration of the dead and sometimes also on Christmas Eve.

6.
Father Afanasy represents an exaggeration of the view of Roman Catholics (such as Poles and Lithuanians) taken by the Ukrainians, who belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

7.
The Zaporozhye (meaning “beyond the rapids” on the Dnieper River) was a territory in the southeastern Ukraine where the Cossacks lived and preserved some measure of independence from the Russian state during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

8.
The Cossacks customarily shaved their heads but grew a topknot on the top of the head, priding themselves on its length.

9.
That is, the feast in honor of the nativity of Saint John the Baptist, celebrated on June 24; in folklore the night before the feast is a time of magic and mystification.

10.
“Yaga” is the second half of the name Baba-yaga, the wicked witch of Russian folktales, here used generically.

11.
A Ukrainian folk dance and the music for it.

12.
Probably a slighting reference to the Jews, who often kept taverns in the Ukraine.

The Night Before Christmas

1.
See note 5 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

2.
See note 1 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

3.
The period of fast preceding the feast of Sts.
Peter and Paul on June 29.

4.
A
panikhida
is an Orthodox prayer service in memory of the dead.

5.
A Zaporozhets was a Cossack from the Zaporozhye (see note 7 to “St.
John’s Eve”).

6.
The only food permitted on the last day of the Advent fast (i.e., Christmas Eve).

7.
The Setch was the sociopolitical and military organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the Zaporozhye—a form of republic headed by a chief.
The freedoms of the Setch were gradually curtailed in the eighteenth century, and in 1775 it was finally abolished.

8.
The term
hetman
(from the German
Hauptmann
) originally referred to the commander in chief of the Polish army.
The Cossacks used it as the title of their own elected chief.
It is comically misapplied here.

9.
Grigory Alexandrovich, Prince Potemkin (1739–91), field marshal and statesman, in 1774 became the favorite of the empress Catherine II (1729–96) and thereafter guided Russian state policy.

10.
The Italian
carabinieri
were members of an army corps also used as a police force—a degrading function in the opinion of the Cossacks.

11.
On “Crimeans” see note 4 to “St.
John’s Eve.” The allusion is to the Russian conquest of the Crimea from the Turks in 1771.

12.
The empress is addressing the dramatist Denis Fonvizin (1745–92), whose plays
The Brigadier
and
The Minor
are classics of the Russian theater and the best Russian prose comedies before Gogol’s own
Inspector General.

13.
Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95), the great French poet and fabulist.

14.
The iconostasis is an icon-bearing partition with three doors that spans the width of an Orthodox church, separating the sanctuary from the body of the church.

The Terrible Vengeance

1.
See note 5 to “The Night Before Christmas.”

2.
Ksiȩdzy
is the plural of
ksiądz
, Polish for priest; adopted by Russian, the word acquired pejorative connotations as referring to Roman Catholic priests (see note 6 to “St.
John’s Eve”).
Rebaptizing implied that the priests did not consider the Orthodox Ukrainians to be Christians.

3.
The Zaporozhtsy under the leadership of Sagaidachny (see note 2 to “St.
John’s Eve”) campaigned against the Crimean Tartar khanate, remnant of the Golden Horde of the Mongols, and fought them on the shore of the Sivash (the “Salt Lake”) in 1620.

4.
See note 1 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

5.
The Uniates are adherents of the so-called Union of Brest (
Unia
in Latin), declared at the church council at Brest in 1595, by which western Russian churches were placed under the jurisdiction of the pope of Rome, with the understanding that, while accepting the dogmas of Roman Catholicism, they would retain the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The
Unia
aroused great dissension at the time, and has been a cause of struggle in the Ukraine and elsewhere to this day.

6.
The Pospolitstvo was the combined nobility of Poland and Lithuania, united under one scepter in 1569.

7.
See note 8 to “The Night Before Christmas.”

8.
The enemy of Christ whose appearance in the “last days” is prophesied in Revelation (11:7), and of whom Saint John writes in his first epistle: “… and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come …” (1 John 2:18).

9.
See note 4 to “The Night Before Christmas.” It is a popular belief that the soul does not leave this world until forty days after death.

10.
See note 2 to “St.
John’s Eve” and note 3 above.

11.
See footnote (author’s note) on p.
15.

12.
The Liman (an inlet of the Black Sea near Odessa) and the Crimea are in the very south of the Ukraine, as far as possible from Kiev; Galicia, extending to the northern slopes of the Carpathians, is now divided between the western Ukraine and eastern Poland; geographically, it is to the right, not the left, looking south from Kiev.

13.
See note 10 above.
Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1593–1657), hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, rose up against the Poles in 1648.

14.
That is, Stefan Batory, a Hungarian prince who was king of Poland from 1575 to 1586.

Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt

1.
Pirozhki
(plural of
pirozhok
) are small pastries with sweet or savory fillings.

2.
A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee.

3.
Latin for “knows,” meaning that the student has learned the lesson.

4.
A concentrate produced by allowing wine to freeze and then removing the frozen portion.

5.
See note 1 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

6.
Adult male serfs were known in Russia as “souls.” Censuses for tax purposes were taken at intervals of as much as fifteen years, between which the number of souls on an estate might of course increase (or decrease).

7.
The feast of Saint Philip falls on November 14 and marks the beginning of the Advent fast.

8.
A book entitled
The Journey of Trifon Korobeinikov
, an account written by the Moscow clerk Trifon Korobeinikov of his journey to Mount Athos with a mission sent by the tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”).
First published in the eighteenth century, it went through forty editions, testifying to its immense popularity.
Korobeinikov also wrote
Description of the Route from Moscow to Constantinople
after a second journey in 1594.

Old World Landowners

1.
Mythological symbol of conjugal love, Philemon and Baucis were a Phrygian couple who welcomed Zeus and Hermes, traveling in disguise, when their compatriots refused them hospitality.
In return, they were spared the flood that the divinities sent the Phrygians as a punishment.
Their thatched cottage became a temple in which they ministered, and they asked that one of them not die without the other.
In old age they were changed into trees.

2.
Ukrainian (Little Russian) names frequently end in
o
, which would be Russified by the addition of a
v.

3.
Peter III (1728–62) became emperor of Russia in 1762 and was assassinated at the instigation of his wife, the empress Catherine II, who thereafter ruled alone.

4.
Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Duchess of La Vallière (1644–1710), was a favorite of Louis XIV.
She ended her life as a Carmelite nun.

5.
A volunteer defense force in the Ukraine during the war with Napoleon in 1812.

6.
See note 1 to “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt.”

7.
A dish made from grain (wheat, buckwheat, oats, rye, millet) boiled with water or milk.

8.
See note 1 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

9.
The armies of Catherine II fought successfully against the Turks in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

10.
It was customary in Russia to lay a dead person out on a table until the coffin was prepared.

11.
See note 5 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

12.
The final hymn of the Orthodox funeral service.

13.
“Small open,” a French card-playing term.

14.
Patties of cottage cheese mixed with flour and eggs and fried.

Viy

1.
Russian seminary education was open to the lower classes and was often subsidized by state scholarships; seminarians were thus not necessarily preparing for the priesthood.

2.
Herodias, wife of Herod the tetrarch and mother of Salome, ordered the beheading of John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1–11); Potiphar, an officer of the Egyptian pharaoh, bought Joseph as a slave and made him overseer of his house; his wife falsely accused Joseph of trying to lie with her (Genesis 39).

3.
See note 7 to “Old World Landowners.”

4.
See note 8 to “St.
John’s Eve.”

5.
Earlier of the two summer fasts (see note 3 to “The Night Before Christmas”).

6.
“Master” in Latin.

7.
Thus in the original.
The French
bon mot
means a clever or witty saying.

8.
See note 14 to “The Night Before Christmas.”

9.
See note 4 to “The Night Before Christmas.”

The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich

1.
A word of Hungarian origin meaning a frock coat, caftan, or jacket lined with fur.