E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
Gogol And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78227-516-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Essential Stories
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-516-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was born in 1809 in Ukraine, and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work in an obscure government ministry. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), made him famous, and he went on to write several further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. Part I of his great, and only novel, Dead Souls, appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically, and he burned much of his writing, including part II of Dead Souls. He died in 1852, possibly from self-starvation.
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“The world has no place for him!” says the madman, Aksenty Poprishchin, at the culmination of the second story in this book. He is talking about himself in the third person, as “madmen” sometimes do; but he might equally be talking about his creator. Like Poprishchin, Nikolai Gogol was, albeit briefly, a malfunctioning cog in the intimidating bureaucracy of 1830s St Petersburg. And like Poprishchin, Gogol also occupied no well-defined place in city, world or universe. Throughout his adult life he had no fixed home or even country; no settled role in the status-bound system of state “service” that obtained in Tsarist Russia; no significant other, male or female, to anchor him through his long years of itinerancy; no stable place, even, in the spiritual hierarchies that he himself tried to construct in his unfinished epic, Dead Souls, and in the late writings that, in their frequent stridency, presaged his own descent into sickness, compulsive fasting and an agonizing death at the age of forty-two. “Maybe I don’t even know who I am,” says Poprishchin, a clerk who would be king. So, too, Gogol, who appears to have spent much of his life asking himself whether he was an instrument of Providence, or an impostor.
Similarly oblique biographical subtexts may be read into all the richly disorientating stories in this volume. To be sure, each can be appreciated and enjoyed without any surrounding context, such is the enduring freshness of their vision, language and form, not to mention their high comedy and strangeness. But only a purist would claim that they cannot be illuminated by some knowledge of their frequently disorientated author.
As a child, Gogol certainly did have a home to call his own: he grew up in a loving family on a modest country estate in the Poltava province of Ukraine, which, as part of the Russian Empire, was officially known as Little Russia (Malorossiya). Nikolai spoke Russian with his parents, but heard plenty of Ukrainian in the house from his nanny and other relatives. His father, Vasily, wrote plays in both languages. The food, history, songs and warmth of traditional Ukraine would remain dear to Nikolai, and seemed, at times, to make him sympathetic towards other nations whose independence had been quashed by Russia; but they also represented a world on the wane, as the elegiacally ironic story ‘Old-World Landowners’ makes distressingly clear. The Zaporozhian Cossacks who had thrived in Ukraine in previous centuries would remain an emblem for Gogol of a heroic past and the breadth of the human spirit more generally. But the combined efforts of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had largely muzzled these unruly warriors, while the most heroic exploit of recent times belonged to Russia: its ousting of Napoleon just three years after Gogol’s birth in 1809.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Gogol grew up in “Little Russia” already mentally displaced, his eyes trained on “Great Russia” and its glamorous capital, St Petersburg, the magnet of both power and culture. The proximity of the Gogols to the estate of Dmitry Troshchinsky, twice a minister under Alexander I and their effective patron, could only have reinforced this sense. So it was that in the winter of 1828, after seven years in a boarding school some 150 miles from home—his first, very painful dislocation—Gogol set out for St Petersburg, filled with inchoate dreams of serving the state and achieving glory.
Disillusion set in instantly and lastingly. The letters he wrote to his now widowed mother, shortly after arriving, provide the most eloquent introduction to the first three stories of this volume, all set in St Petersburg. Gogol was notoriously unreliable, as a man and correspondent, but these impressions pulse with unfeigned intensity of feeling:
I will add that I did not find Petersburg to be at all as I expected; I imagined it to be far more beautiful and majestic, and the rumours which others have spread about it are also false. (3rd January 1829)
Then, more expansively, nearly four months later:
Petersburg is not remotely like other European capitals or Moscow. As a rule, every capital is characterized by its people, who leave upon it the stamp of nationality, but no character has been stamped on Petersburg: the foreigners who have settled here have made themselves at home and are not remotely like foreigners, while the Russians, in turn, have made themselves foreign and become neither one thing nor the other. There is an extraordinary silence here; no spirit shines in the people; it’s all government clerks and officials nattering on about their Departments and Boards; everything has been crushed and besmirched in the pointless, worthless labour in which their lives are fruitlessly expended. It’s very amusing to see these people on the streets and pavements; they can be so absorbed in their thoughts that when you draw level with them you can hear them arguing and chatting with themselves, sometimes with the addition of physical jerks and gesticulations. (30th April 1829)
In such letters Gogol was, no doubt, projecting his own personal trauma at finding himself, a middle-ranking provincial, lost and unwanted in St Petersburg, and things did not improve very quickly: it took him a year to find employment in the civil service, which he detested as much as he must have expected. After eighteen months or so serving in various departments, he tried his hand in other fields, such as acting and teaching. A genius, after all, can flourish in any sphere; but so, as Gogol would show in his great play The Inspector General, can an impostor, if only for a while.
Projection or otherwise, the St Petersburg described above is the matrix for Gogol’s writing: an inauthentic, mock-European, faux-modern city in which regalia and rank mask the underlying reality, visible only to the dislocated Gogol, that nothing is as it should be or as it seems. It is a place where the slick and the educated merely affect piety and no longer believe in the devil, who haunts Gogol’s Petersburg incognito. Above all, it is a place of lack, of absence, not “the window onto Europe” conceived by Peter the Great (to cite Alexander Pushkin’s epic poem The Bronze Horseman), but the portal to the negative universe of Gogol’s subsequent writing. It was St Petersburg that showed Gogol what human beings become when they lose contact with the aesthetic and spiritual potential that had once given life meaning and scale—the same human beings whom Gogol would try, like Sisyphus, to roll back up the mountain of Dead Souls.
For a while, Gogol’s disillusionment proved highly productive, releasing a stream of fiction and drama that would allow him, on Pushkin’s death in 1837, to be recognized as Russia’s premier living writer. After the disaster of his first publication, a Romantic idyll in verse, he made his breakthrough with two volumes of stories set in Ukraine, rich in folklore, prose poetry and the supernatural. The Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32), as they were called, won high praise from Pushkin and continue to enchant. They are most effective, however, when read en masse. Moreover, it was only when Gogol integrated the shock of St Petersburg into his writing that he became a satirist of genius, while also managing to bring greater artistic control to the humour, playful storytelling and mastery of voice already evident in the Dikanka tales.
This collection begins, then, with Gogol’s first Petersburg story, ‘The Nose’, which was written in 1832 but deemed too “vulgar, dirty and trivial” by the editors to whom it was sent (it was later rescued by Pushkin and published in his journal, The Contemporary). No reader can help registering the missing nose of the story as the phallic symbol it so patently is; the nineteenth-century and pre-Freudian reader would have been quicker still to associate the protagonist’s plight with saddle nose, a very real consequence of syphilis (common diseases of this kind may be one reason why the hypochondriac Gogol appears to have been largely celibate, leaving aside his disputed sexual preferences). Initially, the story was to be called ‘Son’ (‘A Dream’), and to end as that title would suggest. Gogol’s decision to change the ending and invert the title from ‘Son’ to ‘Nos’ was a masterstroke. It also opened the path to the “fantastical realism” that, in its merging of the empirical and supernatural, would bring such fame to Gogol’s first St Petersburg descendant, Dostoevsky, and, in the twentieth century, to Mikhail Bulgakov, also born in Ukraine.
‘The Nose’ was followed in fairly quick succession by another exploration of the unseemly and the fantastic al, ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1834), and two stories, not included here, that are connected by Gogol’s lifelong fascination with the visual arts and the responsibilities of the artist in general: ‘Nevsky Prospect’ and ‘The Portrait’. These two tales, though undeniably important and intermittently brilliant, stand in this reader’s estimation one or two notches lower than the other Petersburg stories, perhaps because of the difficulty...
