You’ll leave out the best bits. - No. I’ll put in the best bits. - how does The Government Inspector begin and end?

The play begins with a blinding flash of lightning and ends in a thunderclap.  In fact it is wholly placed in the tense gap between the flash and the crash.  There is no so-called “exposition.”  Thunderbolts do not lose time explaining meteorological conditions.  The whole world is one ozone-blue shiver and we are in the middle of it.  (Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 1944, p. 42)

The play is The Government Inspector (1836), “the greatest play ever written in Russian” (VN, 35-6), or, as I think of it, The Greatest Play of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Not Written in German (TGPOTFHOT19CNWIG).  Nabokov is describing the structure of the play.  The flash of lightning is the news that the corrupt little town will be visited by a government inspector.  The play then races to the crash, which, strangely, is the news that the town will be visited by a government inspector.  Curtain.

I don’t want to argue that the play should be read at a breathless pace – the number of bloggers who practically brag about skimming – no, never mind that - but that’s how the play should be imagined.  It should move like the Marx Brothers.  Faster.

DOBCHINSKY:  Let me tell them the story, Bobchinsky.

BOBCHINSKY:  No, no, let me do it.  You can’t tell a story like I tell a story.

DOBCHINSKY:  You’ll muddle it up.  He muddles it up.  You’ll leave out the best bits.

BOBCHINSKY:  No.  I’ll put in the best bits.  The worst bits as well.  Leave it to me, Dobchinsky.

DOBCHINSKY:  But, Bobchinsky…

BOBCHINSKY:  Oh, make him shut up!

GOVERNOR:  For Christ’s sake, let’s have it.  Spare my blood pressure.  Take a seat, Petr.

DOBCHINSKY and BOBCHINSKY both try to sit in it. (Act I, Scene 1)

Bobch. and Dobch. are both named Petr.  Is that last joke beneath you?  Not me, no, no.  Not me.  I want the worst bits and the best bits.  Bobchinsky is right, by the way.  His story includes the hot pie stall and a fresh salmon snack and a keg of French brandy and the newborn son of the barkeep, a “bright little chap,” who will be like his father and “run the bar some day.”  Also, somehow, he tells the governor that the government inspector is already in town.

Back to the lightning and thunder.  Adrian Mitchell’s 1985 translation of The Government Inspector (all quotations have been from Mitchell) begins this way:

GOVERNOR:  Good morning, gentlemen.  I’ve got some news for you.  Appalling news.  We’re to be visited by an inspector.

A flash of lightning – half a second. The GOVERNOR sits down.

And it ends, just before the famous tableau, with “There is a rolling thunderclap.”  No other translation begins or ends like this.  Gogol’s play, the one in Russian, doesn’t, either.  That end should be more like “The words strike them like a thunderclap.”  Nabokov spins that last simile of Gogol’s into an overarching metaphor.  Adrian Mitchell literalizes the metaphor – he is actually stealing it from Nabokov!

Terrible, the liberties translators take.  Tsk tsk.  I just read the Joshua Cooper (Penguin Classics) translation, and poked around in a bunch of others, and I have to say, if you do not read the Adrian Mitchell version, y’ain’t read Gogol.  I don't care what liberties he took.  Ain’t much lightning or thunder in those others.  Those who remember The Young Ones will feel a pang of envy when they learn that Rik Mayall starred in the first production of Mitchell’s The Government Inspector.  I felt more than a pang.

They never understand jokes.

Dostoevsky's talent seems to me to be essentially comic and non-novelistic.  Vladimir Nabokov argued that Dostoevsky “seems to have been chosen to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.”*  Remove the dialogues and monologues from The Brothers Karamazov and there won’t be much book left, and much of what remains are little more than stage directions. Large parts of the book float by free of any but the most minimal details.

Listen: in dreams and especially in nightmares, well, let’s say as a result of indigestion or whatever, a man sometimes see such artistic dreams, such complex and real actuality, such events, or even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details, beginning from your highest manifestations down to the last shirt button, as I swear even Leo Tolstoy couldn’t invent… (639)

The speaker here is either the Devil, or a hallucination of the Devil.  As such, I should be careful about trusting anything he says.  It’s a devil who takes steam baths, goes to the doctor for rheumatism, and writes literary criticism for the newspapers, but still, the devil lies.  Nevertheless, this is a pretty good description of The Brothers Karamazov.

If I want visually arresting scenes, where do I look?  Father Ferapont’s and Liza’s devils, or Alyosha’s dream in the “Cana of Galilee” chapter, or Dmitri’s dream of “the wee one” (506-8).  Or Ivan’s argument with the devil, which is mostly a piece of pure stagecraft, but contains the single most detailed character description in the novel.

The devil has thick, long, dark hair, with just a little gray.  He has “a tortoiseshell lorgnette on a black ribbon” and a gold ring with an opal.  His clothes are shabby and outdated, and his “soft, downy white hat” is out of season.  I have no idea what that hat is supposed to look like.  Anyway, now the description takes a turn.**

We have seen how the devil appears, but to complete the description, we must know what he is like.  “[A] former idle landowner that flourished in the time of serfdom,… gradually fallen into poverty and become a sort of sponger” (636)  He plays cards, and is probably single, but if he has children they are under the care of “some aunts” and are never mentioned, although he “sometimes” answers the letters his children send him at Christmas.  All of this, to tell us what the fellow, who is actually a hallucinatory devil, looks like.

It’s the most purely Gogolian passage in the entire novel, kicking off the most Gogolian chapter.  Those children, those aunts, where did they come from?  The devil invokes Gogol again and again – quoting The Government-Inspector (1836) (p. 641), taking his nose to the doctor, and then following with a story about a man who lost his nose (to decidedly non-Gogolian syphilis).  A story about the devil flying through the air invokes one of Gogol’s Ukrainian stories, I think – I can’t remember which one.  One reason I find “The Devil” chapter so good is that it allows Dostoevsky the chance to unharness his inner comedian.

I have been relying on two books by Victor Terras, Reading Dostoevsky (1998), and A Karamazov Companion (2002), for hints and tips.  Terras argues that Smerdyakov is actually the devil in some sense, an unnaturally born liar and tempter.  See the scene on p. 624, where Ivan is reduced to “convulsive fear” at the prospect of seeing Smerdyakov’s left foot, for a key piece of evidence.  Terras claims that the devil appears to Ivan at the exact moment of Smerdyakov’s death, which I think is an exaggeration, although the timing has to be pretty close, and the idea puts a keen spin on the devil’s arguments for despair at the end of the chapter – what if he is describing his own suicide, as well as advocating Ivan’s?

But I know Terras is wrong.  Smerdyakov cannot be the Gogol-loving devil.  We have to turn back 500 pages, to the chapter about Smerdyakov’s childhood.  It is worth remembering that Fyodor Karamazov is another true Gogolian:

He immediately gave Smerdyakov the key to the bookcase: “Well, read then, you can be my librarian; sit and read, it’s better than loafing around the yard. Here, try this one,” and Fyodor Pavlovich handed him Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

The lad read it but with displeasure; he never once smiled, and, on the contrary, finished it with a frown.

“What? Not funny?” asked Fyodor Pavlovich.

Smerdyakov was silent.

“Answer, fool!”

“It’s all about lies,” Smerdyakov drawled, grinning.

“Well, then, go the devil with your lackey soul!” (125)

But what use could the devil have for someone who does not find Nikolai Gogol funny?

The context-damaged title quotation can be found on p. 587.

* Lectures on Russian Literature, 1981, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 104.

**  The devil has a suspicious resemblance to Ivan Turgenev, as described in Leonard Tsypkin's brilliant 1981 novel about Dostoevsky, Summer in Baden Baden.  I hate to think how many of my conceptions about Dostoevsky are based on nothing more than this novel.

In which I tear myself from the study of mummifed cats to look at Marc Chagall images

I had a wonderful, really excellent, absolutely top notch week on the Yiddish writer S. Ansky planned. But a comment from Neil of the dangerous* Adventures in the Print Trade derailed me, so I'll have to postpone that. Perhaps I will finish S. Ansky week before I devote my life to the study of mummified cats and their importation to England. At some point, I plan to become the world's first full-time mummified cat blogger. But that's in the future.

Wandering around in the secondary work on Yiddish literature, the name of Marc Chagall kept coming up, for obvious enough reasons. At some point, it occurred to me that I didn't really know much about Chagall. Didn't like him much, either, for what that's worth. At a later point, it occurred to me that I could read a book about him. That's my solution to everything.

Ignorant and slothful, I turned where I always do, to the Phaidon "Arts and Ideas" series, Chagall by Monica Bohm-Duchen. There are certainly plenty of other Chagall biographies. Physically, the Phaidon books are marvels, some of my favorites, so I always go there first, and usually last. The Bohm-Duchen book is fine; I certainly learned a lot.

I had no idea that Chagall had such a strong literary connection. The image up and to the left, is Literature itself, somehow, an allegorical image for a theater (there is also Music and Dance). I've adopted this as my Amateur Reader icon, even though it becomes so small that no one can tell what it is.

Beisdes befriending every other French poet and writing poetry himself, Chagall made illustrations for Dead Souls, the Hebrew Bible, the Fables of La Fontaine, the memoir of I. L. Peretz - and I'm forgetting some. The only ones that I've looked at with any real attention are the Bible prints, because they're easily available, in a Dover reprint of the French magazine that originally published them. In 1956 and again in 1960, you could just go to the newstand, I guess, and buy a magazine containing nothing but original Chagall prints. And, financially, you should have. On the right, we see Job in despair. Don't worry, Job, God will give you new cattle. As for your sons, ahem, well, you'll get sons, too, just as good as the other ones.

In theory, I should be the most interested in Chagall's illustrations for Dead Souls, since I admire that novel so much. But I'm missing something. I mean, see left. That's certainly Chagall - is it Gogol? These images all strike me the same way. However interesting they may be, I find it hard to see how they serve the text. Maybe the personality of the artist is too strong for the task. Or maybe if I read an illustrated version of the novel, all would be clear.

Now, over on the right, Chichikov packing his trunk - that's certainly in the right spirit. Chichikov really is that round, and the view of our non-hero is appropriate. Chagall knew the book well, at least.

All right, it's late, so I should stop. And the mummified cats are calling, calling, calling.

* Why dangerous? Because everything he puts on the website is for sale here. If the dollar were a little stronger...

The Wuthering Expectations Year in Review

The most important statistic first, Number of Books Read: 107, assuming I finish Vanity Fair soon. 107! Awesome! What's that? Is one of these books basically two pages long? Yes, what's your point? No, no, no, it totally counts.

So one thing that happened this year was that I read shorter books than usual. Really short, hundred pagers, or poetry collections that, if stripped of white space, might be fifty pages. One reason was the trip to Senegal. For a variety of reasons, including some constraints of West African publishing, many of the most famous Senegalese books are very short.

Another reason was the sudden, surprise trip to Tokyo. In that case, I deliberately selected short books.

A final reason was that it's simply a myth that the 19th century is particularly characterized by long books.

I hope that was the final reason. Another possibility is that I read short books in order to have something to write about. I hope not. I just started The Count of Monte Cristo for balance.

What does length mean, anyway? The Hardest Book of the Year was a very short one, Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, recommended by some well-meaning, I assume, commenters. My poor head, my poor head, it trembles yet.

Best Book of the Year: Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, the Greatest Novel of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. I state that opinion with great confidence - not confidence that anyone will agree with me, but that I am unlikely to change my mind. Vanity Fair, which I love, probably won't quite make it that far. This is a bet a fellow wants to lose, so I hope that Dombey and Son or Mary Barton or The Count of Monte Cristo really knock me out. But I have my doubts.

De-Humiliations: Meaning, famous books that I read for the first time. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Theodor Storm's Immensee. I should point out that although I enjoy this game, I do not actually find it humiliating that I have not read whatever books I haven't read, even if those books are Middlemarch, Walden, or Les Miserables. I mean, I want to read them, but the Amateur Reader does not, and should not, actually feel bad that he hasn't. Maybe I should also count Adam Bede as a de-Humiliation, since I had never read George Eliot before.

More Favorites: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet; Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider; Prosper Mérimée, Colomba; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas; Aminata Sow Fall, The Beggars' Strike; Ousmane Sèmbene, God's Bits of Wood; Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful". Theodor Storm's stories were generally very impressive.

Robert Browning, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics; One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth; a 17th century obscurity called Hamlet (thanks, Nigel!)

Christpher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan ; Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang; Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol.

The mention of Machado de Assis reminds me of a special category, Worst Editing I Saw All Year: Oxford University Press, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis. I read the 1996 first edition, the flagship title in their Library of Latin American Literature.

There was a major editing error every three pages or so. Some were like "now\know", some were like "hedl\held". They were spread through the entire novel. My favorite howler was in the introduction, where the novel is compared to Erasmus's In Praise of Polly, twice on the same page. Now, I would love to read that book, presumably an ode to Erasmus's favorite parrot, but it unfortunately does not exist. Late in the novel, the narrator mentions In Prasie of Folly, suggesting that the editor of the introduction did not read the actual novel too carefully.

Well, it was only a major English edition of the greatest Brazilian novel. Why knock yourself out.

Anyway, what a lot of good books.

Next: next.

Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol - my favorite biography - "I said there were students and students."

- "Well." - said my publisher, - "I like it - but I do think the student ought to be told what it is all about."

I said...

- "No," - he said, - "I don't mean that. I mean the student ought to be told more about Gogol's books. I mean the plots. He would want to know what those books are about."

I said...

"No, you have not," - he said. - "I have gone through it carefully and so has my wife, and we have not found the plots. There should also be some kind of bibliography or chronology at the end. The student ought to be able to find his way, otherwise he would be puzzled and would not bother to read any further."

I said that an intelligent person could always look up dates and things in a good encyclopedia or in any manual of Russian literature. He said that a student would not be necessarily an intelligent person and anyway would resent the trouble of having to look up things. I said there were students and students. He said that from a publisher's point of view there was only one sort.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, pp. 151-2.

The above is how Nabokov more or less ends his dazzling short biography of Nikolai Gogol, dashes and ellipses included. I'll let the (fictional, presumably) excerpt speak for itself. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in, let's say, reading. Not just reading Gogol - reading books.

Once you've read it, you will perhaps see the struggles - anxiety, even - I have had this week, trying to write something about Gogol that is not just a series of quotations from Nabokov.

When I said short, I mean short: 175 pages, including the chronology and index (which will not, in this case, help you find the Crown Jewels). More biographies should be this long. I don't want to exaggerate - I have read the 1,400 pages of the first two volumes of Nicholas Boyle's biography of Goethe, and will dive into volume 3 as soon as it's published - but most of those big brick-like literary biographies are not for me.

So many of the short (less than 200 pages) biographies seem to be in series now - Penguin Lives, Ackroyd's Brief Lives, Overlook Illustrated Lives. Edmund White's little Proust bio is a pleasure, as is Joseph Epstein on Tocqueville. Madison Smartt Bell on Lavoisier. Nigel Nicholson on Virginia Woolf.

None of these hit quite the same perfect combination as Nabokov of fine prose, organization, and focus on the writer's work. But all are worth the two hours or so they'll take you.

Does anyone have any favorite short biographies they would like to recommend - not just of writers, but of anyone? Who do you think gets it right?

Dead Souls - let us harness a scoundrel

Lest I make Dead Souls sound more humanistic than it really is, I'll turn to the flies. They're everywhere in Dead Souls, as part of the scenery, and in comparisons, beginning with serfs dying like flies. The first extended simile in the novel goes like this (we're at a ball):

"Everywhere one looked black frock coats flitted and darted by, singly and in clusters, as flies dart over a white, gleaming loaf of refined sugar in the summer season on a sultry July day, as an aged housekeeper standing at an open window cleaves and divides the loaf into glittering irregular lumps..." (Ch. 1, p. 8) The lumps are then distributed to children. Doesn't that sound nice. But still, the people at the party are like flies.

This is aside from all of the other places where people are compared to animals, or animals are compared to people. There's generosity here, though. Everyone is ridiculous. We're all in it together. Not a hint of nihilism, but just the way people are. That's the great source of comedy in the novel - go ahead, laugh at everyone. They'll laugh at you, too.

I was complaining a while ago about Scott and Dickens and their dullish virtuous heroes. Gogol (or "Gogol") is entirely on my side:

"There is a turn, and a place, and a time for everything! But, just the same, we have not taken a man of virtue for our hero, after all. And one may even explain why he hasn't been taken. Because it's high time to give a rest to the poor man of virtue; because the phrase 'man of virtue' is formed all too glibly and idly by all lips; because the man of virtue has been turned into a hack and there isn't a writer who doesn't ride him hard, urging him on with a whip or whatever else comes to his hand; because they have overworked the man of virtue to such an extent that now there isn't even a shadow of virtue about him, and there is nothing but skin and bones left of him instead of flesh and blood; because it is only through hypocrisy that they trot out the man of virtue; because the man of virtue isn't held in much respect. No, it's high time, at last, to put an actual scoundrel in harness! And so let us harness a scoundrel." (Ch. 11 , p. 224).

Ho ho! Dickens has to figure out how to make the "man of virtue" real in his world, which has its resemblance to Gogol's. Gogol knows he doesn't belong, and instead gives us Nozdrev, who wants to bet on everything, for example, that he once drank seventeen bottles of champagne; or cultivated Manilov, who names his children Themistoclius and Alcides; or the lieutenant who loves his boots so much that he stays up late "lifting now this foot and now the other and inspecting the deftly and wondrously turned heel of each boot." (Ch. 7, p. 149)

Greatest Novel of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.

The ethics of Dead Souls - how many of you are crowded in here?

A corrupt minor official and con man, Chichikov, wants to buy the legal rights to serfs who are deceased but still on the tax rolls (one set of “dead souls” in Dead Souls). He enters a provincial town and visits local landowners, buying their recently deceased serfs. People grow suspicious, and Chichikov flees. That’s the story of Dead Souls.

Dead Souls is overpopulated. A short novel (250 pages or so), it is stuffed with incidental characters. The first page, for example, introduces not just Chichikov, but four other people, only one of whom is ever seen again. There’s a fellow, for example, who wears a bronze pin, shaped like a pistol. Two others have this conversation as Chichikov rolls by:

"'Look at that, will you?' said one muzhik to the other. 'What a wheel! What do you think, would that wheel make it to Moscow, if need be, or wouldn't it?'

'It would,' answered the other.

'But it wouldn't make it to Kazan, I'm thinking - or would it?'

'Not to Kazan, it wouldn't,' the other answered.

And with that the discussion ended."

The novel is so full of people that they spill over into the metaphors Gogol uses to describe anything and everything – see the examples from the last two days. The parody of the epic simile, this abundance of humanity, is directly tied to the ethics of the novel.

Dead Souls is a novel about slavery (other things, too, sure). A later generation of Russian radicals saw it as a realistic attack on the social conditions of serfs, suggesting that they did not actually read the novel. Nevertheless. The plot is about the buying and selling of people, even if the particular people are dead. Chichikov’s attempts to buy dead serfs deeply confuse most of the other characters. The Public Prosecutor and other officials spend most of Chapters 9 and 10 trying to figure out what Chichikov is up to. Some conclude that he is a famous bandit, others that he is Napoleon in disguise, while the women all understand that the “dead souls” business is just a trick to distract the men while Chichikov elopes with the Governor’s daughter.

This confusion is the ethical heart of the book. If Chichikov were buying live serfs – actual people, slaves – to be resettled in a wilderness a thousand miles away, there would be no confusion. Everything would be perfectly legal, and everyone would approve, and even celebrate. They actually do celebrate, in the great scene where the bear-like Sobekevich eats an entire sturgeon (except for the “inedible tail”).

The “reality” of the characters who emerge from the metaphors is just as strong as the reality of most of the characters who exist in the world of the book. In exactly the same way, the dead souls have as much reality as anyone else. They’re not just legal fictions, but actual (“actual”) people.* At the beginning of Chapter 7, Chichikov looks over the list of his purchases:

“All these details imparted a certain air of freshness: it seemed as if these muzhiks had been alive only yesterday. As he gazed long at the names, Chichikov’s spirit was touched and, with a sigh, he uttered: ‘Good heavens, how many of you are crowded in here! What my hearties, have you done in your time? How did you get along?’” (p. 131)

Is this passage about dead souls, or about Dead Souls?

* One could also take this in an entirely different direction. The "actual" characters are no more real than the metaphorical ones. What is a novel if not a long, complicated metaphor?

Dead Souls and life within a metaphor - he may just have dropped in on Schiller for a chat

At the risk of incoherence, I am going to discuss, with interruptions, a long passage from Dead Souls. It worked for Nabokov. Ha ha! The number of writers whose last words were “It worked for Nabokov” – oh well, let’s try it.

We’re exactly halfway through the novel, at the end of Chapter 6. Our hero Chichikov is returning to town from his excursion to the countryside. This is all one paragraph.

“It was already dusk when they drove up to town. Light and shadow had become thoroughly intermingled and, it seemed, all objects had also become intermingled among themselves. The striped tollgate had taken on some indeterminate hue; the mustachios of the soldier on duty seemed to be up on his forehead and considerably above his eyes, and as for his nose, why, he seemed to have none at all.”

[This is what I was getting at yesterday. Gogol is really looking at the world, and here describes the sort of light effect we might see in a Turner painting. As for the missing nose, see Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose”, and also the drawing of him to the right, in About Me. He was obsessed with noses.]

“The thunderous rattling of the carriage and its bouncing made the occupant notice that it had reached a cobbled way. The street lamps had not been lit yet; only here and there were lights beginning to appear in the windows of the houses, while in the lanes and blind alleys scenes and conversations were taking place inseparable from this time of day in all towns where there are many soldiers, cabbies, workmen, and beings of a peculiar species who look like ladies, wearing red shawls and shoes without stockings and who dart like bats over the street crossings at nightfall.”

[Gogol commonly begins his descriptions with this disclaimer – this is what you see in “all towns” of a certain type. But he immediately starts picking out details – the red shawls, the darting, like bats.]

“Chichikov did not notice them, nor did he notice even the exceedingly slim petty officials with little canes who, probably after taking a stroll beyond the town, were now returning to their homes. At rare intervals there would come floating to Chichikov’s ears such exclamations, apparently feminine, as ‘You lie, you drunkard, I never let him take no such liberties as that with me!’ or: ‘Don’t you be fighting, you ignoramus, but come along to the station house and I’ll show you what’s what!’ In brief, such words as”

[Ah ha, we’re beginning a simile, which for some reason is describing the exclamations Chichikov barely hears.]

“such words as will suddenly scald, like [simile # 2] so much boiling water, some youth of twenty [who is this?] as, lost in reveries, he is on his way home from the theater, his head filled with visions of a Spanish street, night, a wondrous feminine image with a guitar and ringlets. What doesn’t he have in that head of his and what dreams do not come to him?”

[Already, it is easy to forget that the Spanish street and the “image” with the guitar are just theater-inspired fantasies in the mind of a character who exists entirely within the metaphor, which was supposed to tell us what some overheard phrases were like.]

“He is soaring in the clouds, and he may just have dropped in on Schiller [!] for a chat [so the metaphorical man has been to the metaphorical theater to see a metaphorical Don Carlos], when suddenly, like thunder, the fatal words [back to the words] peal out over his head, and he perceives that he has come back to earth once more, but actually to Haymarket Square, and right by a tavern, at that; and once more life has begun strutting its stuff before him in its workaday fashion.”

At this point Chichikov himself, thundering along, also dreaming, although probably not about Schiller, arrives at his own inn, so we leave the simile.

This is the characteristic of Dead Souls, the metaphors that not only describe the “real” world of the novel, but intrude on it, or exist alongside it. The “fictional” young man in a post-theater reverie, or the twenty-year-old fellow with a guitar in yesterday’s pumpkin-head metaphor, has just as much existence as many of the “actual” characters.

Gogol spins out these metaphor-inhabiting characters a dozen times or more, although not always at this length. It’s a virtuoso performance, with only a hint of precedent in his own work, and less in anyone else’s. I don’t think there’s much in the way of successors either. Dead Souls is a unique book.

Does this device mean anything? I’ll take a shot at that tomorrow. This was plenty long.

Dead Souls - crayfish, straw-stemmed cheroots, and that kind of pumpkin

So what’s in Dead Souls that one could not have found elsewhere in 1842? There’s this simile, for example:

“Without the little wench it would have been difficult to accomplish even this, inasmuch as the roads crept off in every direction, like a catch of crayfish when you dump them out of a sack...” (Ch. 3, p. 55)

Everything is like an animal in Dead Souls. Geese, bats, bears, ants, and flies, flies, flies.* Or almost everything – not this fellow:

“The corner shop – or to put it better, it’s windows – was occupied by a vendor of hot mead, with a samovar of ruddy copper and a face as ruddy as his samovar, so that from afar one might think that there were two samovars standing in the window, if only one of them were not sporting a beard as black as pitch.” (Ch. 1, p. 2)

Or this happy couple:

“And quite often as they sat on the divan, suddenly, for no known reason on earth, he abandoning his pipe and she whatever she may have been working on (if it happened to be in her hands at the time, of course), they would impress so languishing and prolonged a kiss upon each other’s lips that one could, while it lasted, smoke a straw-stemmed cheroot to the end.” (Ch. 2, p. 21)**

One could, eh? One more:

“After a brief after-dinner snooze he ordered water and a washbasin to be brought and for an exceedingly long time scrubbed both his cheeks with soap, making them bulge out with his tongue...” (Ch. 1, p. 8)

That’s it, right there, the literal tongue in cheek. Last week I went on a bit about the attention to detail of Walter Scott, and his possible effect on Dickens, Balzac, and others, including Gogol. These writers were bringing the physical world into prose fiction in an unprecedented way. But nobody was looking as carefully at the world around him as Gogol. No one else had seen the bulging cheeks, or at least thought they were worth putting on paper.

Now we’re used to this sort of quotidian precision, here in the year 151 AMB (Anno Madame Bovary). But this novel, full of sneezing, snoring, nose-blowing, and digestion, is a first step on the path to Leopold Bloom on the toilet in Ulysses.***

But are we used to this:

“As Chichikov drove up to the front entrance he noticed two faces that had peered almost simultaneously through the window – one feminine in a house cap, narrow and elongated like a cucumber, and a masculine one, round, broad, like those Moldavian pumpkins called gorliankas, out of which they make, in Russia, balalaikas, the pride and joy of some frolicsome, twenty-year-old country lad, a fellow who knows how to wink and is a dandy and who not only winks at but whistles after the snowy-breasted and snowy-necked maidens who gather around to listen to his soft-stringed strumming.” (Ch. 5, p. 89)

Oh, I see, that kind of pumpkin, the kind that – wait, what is going on here? Who is that winking fellow? Tomorrow, a crack at this.

* Since the people are animals, it’s no surprise when, in Chapter 4, Gogol tells us what some horses are thinking.

** Nota Bene has identified this admirable passage as his favorite. The fussy parenthetical insert is hilarious.

*** I'm not saying there are no precedents. Rabelais, Swift, maybe Sterne. Right. But how about this, describing Russian provincial ladies: "Never did they say: 'I blew my nose; I sweated; I spat'; instead they said: 'I relieved my nose; I had to use my handkerchief.'" (Ch. 8, p. 155) Gogol knows this is new. Gogol nose - this is new.

Nikolai Gogol on how to read - some word or other inevitably emerged

"He was by temperament taciturn rather than talkative; he even had a noble impulse toward enlightenment - i.e., the reading of books, the contents of which presented no difficulty to him whatsoever; it was all one to him if the book dealt with the adventures of an enamored hero or whether it was simply a dictionary or a prayer book - he read everything with the same attentiveness; if a handbook on chemistry were to be thrust under his nose he wouldn't have spurned it either. It wasn't what he read that pleased him, but more the reading itself or, to put it better, the very process of reading - lo and behold, some word or other inevitably emerged out of the welter of letters, even though, at times, the Devil alone knew what the word might mean."

Dead Souls, tr. Guerney, Chapter 2, p. 14 of the Yale University Press edition.

Speaking of page 14:

"In his study there was always some book lying about, with a bookmark on page 14, which he had been steadily reading for two years by now." (Ch. 2, p. 20)

Why are novelists so suspicious of reading? The theme goes back to the beginning, to Don Quixote. However you're reading their precious book, they never think you're doing it right.

Let's spend this week reading and writing about Dead Souls, Greatest Novel of the First Half of the 19th Century.

Gogol's The Overcoat - a rather peculiar sound

Poor Akaky Akakievich. First, his name is ridiculous (it seems to have the same scatological associations in Russian that it does in English, plus it’s a humble saint’s name). Second, he himself is ridiculous. He’s a government clerk, a sort of anti-Bartleby. Akaky is barely more than a human photocopier. He takes copying work home with him because he has no other interests. Poor Akaky.

Akaky needs a new overcoat – this is winter in St. Petersburg, so that's no small thing. After some scraping, and some luck, he finds the money to order a new coat. When he does, his life changes, everything changes, in expectation of the new overcoat:

"His whole existence had in a sense become fuller, as though he had married, as though some other person were present with him, as though he were no longer alone but an agreeable companion had consented to walk the path of life hand in hand with him, and that companion was none other than the new overcoat with its thick padding and its strong, durable lining." (317)

As though he had married!

By the time Akaky acquires his new coat, we’re at page 16 of a 31 page story. Nothing whatsoever has happened besides this: a clerk gets a new coat. If the story were merely a moral parable (which it is, in part) or a ghost story (ditto), Gogol could have begun the story here. But then we would miss this horse:

"Whatever Akaky Akakievich looked at, he saw nothing but his clear, evenly written lines, and it was only perhaps when a horse suddenly appeared from nowhere and placed its head on his shoulder, and with its nostrils blew a real gale on his cheek, that he would notice that he was not in the middle of his writing, but in the middle of the street." (308)

And this tailor's wife:

"Since we have now mentioned the wife, it will be necessary to say a few words about her, too, but unfortunately not much is known about her, except indeed that Petrovich had a wife and that she wore a cap and not a kerchief, but apparently she could not boast of beauty; anyway none but soldiers of the guard peered under her cap when they met her, and they twitched their mustaches and gave vent to a rather peculiar sound." (311)

And a dozen other Gogolian delights. Those soldiers and their mustaches are a sort of Gogol specialty. They're not characters in any sense, just a part of the description of the tailor's wife, but Gogol somehow invests them with a little life of their own.

The Overcoat is, along with The Nose,* a pinnacle of Gogol’s art.

I would be remiss if I failed to point readers to the fine description of The Overcoat at Lizok's Bookshelf.

References are to the University of Chicago Press Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

Also posted at the Russian Reading Challenge.

* And Dead Souls, and The Government Inspector.

Gogol's The Portrait - Was this also a dream?

Nikolai Gogol's The Portrait (1842, though there’s an earlier version as well) is about the mysyterious effect of a portrait on two artists. In one case, talent is corrupted, in the other, exalted. Whenever I come across a story about a painter, or composer, or whatnot, I assume that the author is really working out his ideas about writing. It's what Gogol is doing here, anyway.

A young, brilliant, impoverished painter buys a strange, compelling portrait. Through an obscure circumstance - a ghost? a prophetic dream? - the portrait leads the artist to a great sum of money. Will it surprise anyone to learn that this leads to new problems?

So goes part one. The sequel, or prequel, returns to the beginning but pushes the same ideas to an entirely different conclusion.

Gogol's prose sparkles. At the picture shop:

"A winter scene with white trees, an absolutely red sunset that looked like the glow of a conflagration, a Flemish peasant with a pipe and a broken arm, more like a turkey cock in frills than a human being – such were usually their subjects." (252)

And here's the same sunset again, but real this time:

"The red glow of sunset still lingered over half the sky; the houses which faced the sunset were faintly illuminated by its warm light, while the cold blue light of the moon grew more powerful. More and more the artist began to glance at the sky, which was shimmering in a faint, translucent, uncertain light, and almost at the same moment there burst from his mouth the words, 'What a delicate tone!' and the words, 'Damn it! How upsetting!'” (256)

And that moon returns in the great dream scene. The man in the portrait come to life and reveal a secret. Then that the dream is followed by another dream, and then another - a vertiginous scene.

Gogol is writing at a high level here. Was anyone else writing with as sure a hand at this time (early 1840s)? And this isn’t even Gogol at his best – see tomorrow for that.

References are to the University of Chicago Press Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

Also posted at the Russian Reading Challenge.