The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

and there was Chertokutsky, hunched in a preposterous position and wrapped in his dressing-gown. “Ah, here you are!” said the general in surprise. And with that he slammed the door shut, pulled the apron back over Chertokutsky and drove off, with the gentlemen officers.

(p. 157)

Thus does the anecdote end, in a perfect cul-de-sac of Gogolian psychology. The coverlet of the carriage is peeled back to reveal the error, the sin, the little white lie or the absentmindedness that we had hoped to conceal. We are exposed, and the audience departs. The effect here might be compared with the equally abrupt mid-scene blank-out that ends Eugene Onegin, prompted by the sudden appearance of Tatyana’s husband in the doorway. Chertokutsky’s crouching in the carriage resembles that moment in humiliation but exceeds it greatlyin embarrassment.For theproblemwithembarrassmentisthatitcannot be answered. It cannot be made public or washed clean. One can remotely

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imagine Tatyana’s husband challenging Onegintoa duel after finding hisfriend in his wife’s boudoir. But what can Chertokutsky do, except wince? Or in Dostoevsky’s more spiteful and malevolent variant on the scenario, gnash his teeth? Talk his way out of it? It will only get worse. The witnesses have already driven away. Since embarrassment cannot be remedied, its carriers must wear masks, or go mad, or (literally) come apart.

Consider Gogol’s Petersburg fantasy “The Nose” (1836). A nose disappears from the face of a collegiate assessor (civilian rank Six), turns up in a barber’s freshly baked roll, is seen strolling about the city, and then one morning for no reason reappears on its distraught owner’s face. This much-loved story (Dmitry Shostakovich set it as a Modernist opera in 1930) has accumulated interpretations over the years ranging from Russia’s first Absurdist work to clinical testimony on castration anxiety. But more scandalous for Major Kovalyov than the “absolutely preposterous smooth flat space” between his two cheeks is the fact that his nose, which he tracks down at prayer in the Kazan Cathedral, refuses to repatriate for reasons of rank. “You are mistaken, my good sir,” says the Nose. “I’m on my own [ya sam po sebe]. Furthermore, there cannot be any close relations between us, for to judge by the buttons on your uniform, you must serve in the senate, or perhaps in the Department of Justice. Whereas I am in the Academy.”20 The narrator respects the desire of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov to be called by the military equivalent of his civilian rank because “Major” has more status with the ladies. But how can Major Kovalyov show himself in public now? If a toe had disappeared, it could be covered up with a boot. When the surface defines the person, the definition of horror is an absence that cannot be hidden away.

In Gogol, the absurd aspects of rank blend with the sentimental and the frenetic. Each of these intonations is thickened by an “artless” storyteller who on occasion (as at the end of “The Nose”) demands to know why writers choose such implausible incidents in the first place. But illogicality governs not only events; it permeates every level of the narrative, down to the sounds and punning components of words. A metaphor is developed so richly that it replaces the reality it was supposed to clarify. A non-logical combination of words is masked by sensible syntax. The hero of “The Overcoat” (1842) is a copying clerk and titular councilor (civilian rank Nine), Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. His last name comes from the Russian word for “shoe,” bashmak. But, the narrator notes, it is not known how he got this name, although “his father, his grandfather, and even his brother-in- law wore boots . . .” The abrupt substitution of “boots” for shoes combined with that little word “even” impart a flash of madness to the whole.21 Such garrulous wackiness on the part of the storyteller is matched, or undone, by the flatness and verbal uncreativeness of the hero.

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Akaky himself is so timid he can hardly carry on a conversation, mumbling meaningless particles in place of nouns and verbs. He enjoys copying and is indifferent to rank. But the Petersburg frost makes a new overcoat imperative. He saves up for it, falls in love with it while the tailor is sewing it (or “her”: the Russian word for overcoat, shinel', is feminine in gender) - and she is stolen off his back by hoodlums the first night he wears her. Reprimanded by a general after futilely seeking help from the police, the depleted Akaky dies of humiliation and a chill, only to reappear as a vengeful ghost who pulls overcoats off shoulders of all ranks.

The clerk Akaky is meek. Other pathetic clerks in Gogol’s Petersburg are ambitious. One such is the hero ofDiary of a Madman, Poprishchin, pen-pusher and quill-sharpener. We watch him go out of his mind, entry by entry. Smitten with his boss’s daughter, he gets access to her by purloining letters written by her dog. “Perhaps” - he writes in his diary a few days before declaring himself to be the King of Spain - “I’m really a count or a general, and am merely imagining I’m a titular councilor? Perhaps I really don’t know who I am at all?” As we shall see in Chapter 6, Dostoevsky begins his career by literally rewriting these poor Gogolian clerks, who become the eyes and ears of his early worldview, growing gradually more self-conscious, shrewd, and cruel.

Like his madman Poprishchin and his con man Chichikov from Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol also did not wish people to know precisely who, or where, he was. He had a dazzling gift for distortion and concealment. A brilliant mimic from early childhood, Gogol could create any role out of the most casual verbal prompt. He falsified personal events in his letters home. He left no diaries, memoirs, wife or close family. Even after he had become Russia’s most famous prose writer, he was infuriated when a friend published a realistic portrait of him. Gogol perceived himself and his work in a messianic light. Until fully shaped, his person and message should shine through to others only darkly, if at all. Gogol abandoned Russia in 1837 and spent most of the rest of his life in Italy, writing and despairing of ever completing his epic Dead Souls.

Perhaps a private, evasive, deceptive psyche like Gogol’s can be most accurately grasped by a creative writer of equivalent genius. Pushkin, with his brilliantly visible public life, is well served by several full-length biographies in English, most recently the fascinating and irreverent account by T. J. Binyon (Pushkin: A Biography, 2002). But arguably the best English-language biography of Gogol is still Vladimir Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (1944), a slim volume extremely thin on events. Nabokov begins the story with Gogol’s death in 1852 from malnutrition and gastroenteritis, huge leeches hanging from his nose, after he had burnt, in a frenzy of repentance and on the advice of his Roman Catholic confessor, Parts 2 and 3 of Dead Souls. “Gogol was a strange

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creature,” Nabokov writes. His basic units were not ideasatall but “focal shifts,” abrupt and irrational. “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight . . . but with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent.”22 Respect for rank, good taste, clarity of confrontation, the straight line of honor that permits one to come back home with head held high: this is Pushkin’s familiar landscape. And on the other side, we have Gogol: the sudden crooked “focal shift” of evasion and embarrassment, what Nabokov called “a jerk and a glide,” with the hero darting away out from under our nose.

Pretendership (two authors, two plays, two novels)

As our final juxtaposition of Pushkin and Gogol we will consider, very selectively, four famous works – one novel and one play for each. Our focus for all four is “pretendership” – in Russian, samozvanstvo (literally, “self-naming”): the act of presenting yourself publicly as someone other than who you are. This gesture is relatively straightforward when the pretender in question is clinically mad, as is Poprishchin (protagonist of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman) when he declares himself the King of Spain. Our upcoming examples are more complex. Both of Pushkin’s pretenders are real historical figures in fictionalized garb. What they pretend to is the Russian throne. The two home texts for these adventurers are the drama Boris Godunov (1825), in which a young runaway monk, Grigory Otrepiev, invades Russia claiming to be the Tsarevich Dmitry, youngest son of Ivan the Terrible; and the novel The Captain’s