The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Page 2

  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.

  Gogol labored more over “The Portrait” than over any of his other tales. The expanded second version was published seven years after the first, in the Collected Works of 1842. Belinsky considered it a total failure and thought he knew how it should have been written. He would have purified Gogol’s “realism” of what he considered its alien admixture of the fantastic, “a childish fantasmagoria that could fascinate or frighten people only in the ignorant Middle Ages, but for us is neither amusing nor frightening, but simply ridiculous and boring.” He goes on to explain:

  No, such a realization of the story would do no particular credit to the most insignificant talent. But the thought of the story would be excellent if the poet had understood it in a contemporary spirit: in Chartkov he wanted to portray a gifted artist who ruined his talent, and consequently himself, through greed for money and the fascination of petty fame. And the realization of this thought should have been simple, without fantastic whimsies, grounded in everyday reality: then Gogol, given his talent, would have created something great.

  Belinsky’s suggestion amounts to the negation of the artist Gogol and his replacement by a “critical realist” of the dullest sort, a useful chicken instead of a bird of paradise. The contemporary spirit that Belinsky called for was of no interest at all to the author of “The Portrait.” (A century later, in his little book on Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, though no disciple of Belinsky, offered a similarly rationalizing reduction of Gogol�
�s work, rejecting all the fantastic tales as juvenilia and allowing as the real Gogol only “The Overcoat,” The Inspector General, and the first part of Dead Souls. His criterion was not social utility, however, but artistic idiosyncrasy, an appeal to “that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”) Gogol had a different understanding of the artist’s task and of his temptation. The fantastic and the diabolical were always essential dimensions of his world, never more so than in “The Portrait.”

  He toiled over “The Portrait” because it involved a judgment of his own work and its central question tormented him personally. It was not a question of the harmful influence of money or fame, but something more primitive and essential: the ambiguous power of the artistic image itself. And the more lifelike the image, the more perplexing the question. The ambition to achieve a perfect likeness might go beyond the artist’s control and bring into the world something he never intended. Thus the portrait in Gogol’s tale looks back at its viewers, looks back with the eyes of the Antichrist whose life it has magically prolonged. The corrupting power of the gold it bestows on its new purchaser, the painter Chartkov, is only a secondary effect, an extension of the evil present in the painted image itself. The question the tale explores is whether art is sacramental or sacrilegious, godlike or diabolical, and at what point it may change from one to the other. Some years later, in 1847, Gogol wrote a letter to his father confessor in which he declared himself “guilty and cursed” not only for having portrayed the devil, which he had done with the intention of mocking him, and not only for having painted nothing but grotesque images, being unable to describe a positive character properly, but first of all for having attemped to re-create each thing “as alive as a painter from life.” In “The Portrait,” the terms of this self-condemnation were already embodied dramatically.

  Nature is always doubled by the supernatural in Gogol’s tales, and the ordinary is always open to the assaults of the extraordinary. The reality of the capital is a closed fiction, an unrelieved banality, but filled with gigantic, unexpected forces, like the huge fist “the size of a clerk’s head” that suddenly comes at Akaky Akakievich out of the darkness. If Akaky Akakievich transgressed the order of things by desiring a new overcoat (by desiring anything at all), and is punished most terribly for it in the phantasmal world of Petersburg, he also returns as a phantom himself and has his revenge. He momentarily becomes one of those unexpected forces, robs the important person of his overcoat, frightens a policeman away with “such a fist … as is not to be found even among the living,” and, having grown much taller, vanishes completely into the darkness of night.

  Gogol was made uneasy by his works. They detached themselves from him and lived on their own, producing effects he had not foreseen and that sometimes dismayed him. He would write commentaries after the fact, trying to reduce them to more commonplace and acceptable dimensions. But their initial freedom stayed with them. It was inherent in his method of composition, and in his astonishing artistic gift—astonishing first of all to himself.

  RICHARD PEVEAR

  TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

  THIS TRANSLATION HAS been made from the Russian text of the six-volume Khudozhestvennaya Literatura edition (Moscow, 1952–53).

  We have arranged the tales in the order of their composition. They include four of the eight tales from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32): “St. John’s Eve” from the first volume, and “The Night Before Christmas,” “The Terrible Vengeance,” and “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt” from the second. We have eliminated the forewords of the beekeeper Rusty Panko, but kept his footnotes, as well as the author’s, for individual stories. We include three of the four tales from the two volumes of Mirgorod (1835), omitting only “Taras Bulba.” Of the Petersburg tales (1835–42; the collective title is not Gogol’s but has become traditional), we include all except “Rome.” “The Carriage” is a slight anomaly in this group but belongs to the same period. We give the expanded 1842 version of “The Portrait.”

  The question of rank is of central importance to the Petersburg tales. The following is the table of the civil service ranks as established by the emperor Peter the Great in 1722, with their military equivalents:

  Chancellor

  Commander in Chief

  Actual Privy Councillor

  General

  Privy Councillor

  Lieutenant General

  Actual State Councillor

  Major General

  State Councillor

  —

  Collegiate Councillor

  Colonel

  Court Councillor

  Lieutenant Colonel

  Collegiate Assessor

  Major (or Captain)

  Titular Councillor

  Staff Captain

  Collegiate Secretary

  Lieutenant

  Secretary of Naval Constructions

  —

  Government Secretary

  Second Lieutenant

  Provincial Secretary

  —

  Collegiate Registrar

  —

  The rank of titular councillor conferred personal nobility; the rank of actual state councillor made it hereditary.

  UKRAINIAN TALES

  ST. JOHN’S EVE

  A True Story Told by the Beadle of the — Church

  FOMA GRIGORIEVICH WAS known to have this special sort of quirk: he mortally disliked telling the same thing over again. It sometimes happened, if you talked him into telling something a second time, that you'd look and he'd throw in some new thing or change it so it was unrecognizable. Once one of those gentlemen—it's hard for us simple folk to fit a name to them: writers, no, not writers, but the same as the dealers at our fairs: they snatch, they cajole, they steal all sorts of stuff, and then bring out booklets no thicker than a primer every month or week—one of those gentlemen coaxed this same story out of Foma Grigorievich, who then forgot all about it. Only there comes this same young sir from Poltava in a pea-green caftan, whom I've already mentioned and one of whose stories I think you've already read, toting a little book with him, and opening it in the middle, he shows it to us. Foma Grigorievich was just about to saddle his nose with his spectacles, but remembering that he'd forgotten to bind them with thread and stick it down with wax, he handed the book to me. Having a smattering of letters and not needing spectacles, I began to read. Before I had time to turn two pages, he suddenly grabbed my arm and stopped me.

  "Wait! first tell me, what's that you're reading?"

  I confess, I was a bit taken aback by such a question. "What's this I'm reading, Foma Grigorievich? Why, your true story, your very own words."

  "Who told you those are my words?"

  "What better proof, it's printed here: told by the beadle So-and-so."

  "Spit on the head of the one who printed it! He's lying, the dad-blasted Muscovite! Did I say that? The devil it's the same! He's got a screw loose! Listen, I'll tell it to you now."

  We moved closer to the table and he began.

  MY GRANDFATHER (GOD rest his soul! and may he eat nothing in that world but white rolls and poppyseed cakes with honey!) was a wonderful storyteller. Once he began to talk, you wouldn't budge from your place the whole day for listening. No comparison with some present-day babbler, who starts spouting off, and in such language as if he hadn't had anything to eat for three days— you just grab your hat and run. I remember like now—the old woman, my late mother, was still alive—how on a long winter's evening, when there was a biting frost outside that walled us up solidly behind the narrow window of our cottage, she used to sit by the comb, pulling the long thread out with her hand, rocking the cradle with her foot, and humming a song that I can hear as if it was now. An oil lamp, trembling and flickering as if frightened of something, lighted our cottage. The spindle whirred; and all of us children, clustered together, listened to our grandfather, who was so old he hadn't left the s
tove1 in five years. But his wondrous talk about olden times, about Cossack raids, about the Polacks, about the mighty deeds of Podkova, Poltora Kozhukha, and Sagaidachny, 2 never interested us as much as his stories about some strange marvel of old, which sent shivers all through us and made our hair stand on end. Now and then fear would take such hold of you that everything in the evening appeared like God knows what monster. If you happened to step out of the cottage at night for something, you'd think a visitor from the other world had gone to lie down in your bed. And may I never tell this story another time if I didn't often mistake my own blouse, from a distance, for a curled-up devil at the head of the bed. But the main thing in my grandfather's stories was that he never in his life told a lie, and whatever he used to say, that was precisely what had happened. I'll tell one of his wonderful stories for you now. I know there are lots of those smart alecks who do some scribbling in the courts and even read civic writings, and who, if they were handed a simple prayer book, wouldn't be able to make out a jot of it—but display their teeth shamefully, that they can do. For them, whatever you say is funny. Such disbelief has spread through the world! What's more—may God and the most pure Virgin not love me!—maybe even you won't believe me: once I made mention of witches, and what do you think? some daredevil turned up who didn't believe in witches! Yes, thank God, I've lived so long in the world, I've seen such infidels as find giving a priest a ride in a sieve3 easier than taking snuff is for the likes of us; and they, too, go in fear of witches. But if they were to dream. . . only I don't want to say what, there's no point talking about them.