Daughter (1836), in which the Cossack chieftain Emelyan Pugachov claimsto be Peter III, deposed and deceased spouse of Empress Catherine II. Pushkin’s Pugachov, in conversation with thenovel’s hero Grinyov, remembers (from oral legend? from Pushkin’s play?) Otrepiev’s success at toppling the Godunovs and is inspired to imitate it.
In contrast to Pushkin, both of Gogol’s pretenders – or better, imposters – are fictional creations with wholly civilian concerns. Khlestakov from The Government Inspector (1836) is a Petersburg fop who, passing through a provincial town, is mistaken for a police investigator by the gullible, corrupt local bureaucracy. Chichikov from Dead Souls (1842) is a trickster in the mode of traveling salesman – or better, buyer-up of deceased serfs. These two imposters are fictional in a deeper sense than the fact that Gogol made them up. They also make themselves up as they go along, as do all rogues, feeding
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off the foolishness or venality of the terrain. In Gogol’s messianic vision, such inconstancy of personality was not creative or playful but unclean, demonic. Pushkin’s historical pretenders, Grishka Otrepiev from 1604 and Pugachov from the 1770s, were in their time also perceived as “demonic,” branded villains and Antichrists. Let us first consider the two plays.
Gogol’s provincial town is taken up by identity crises of a comic and disreputable sort. The Mayor’s primary anxiety is to determine whether this “inspector” is as corrupt as himself and therefore can be bribed into silence about the town’s petty vice. In Gogol, extended contact between characters makes them (and us) increasingly nervous; people corrode one another as communication proceeds. Pushkin, in contrast, presents his pretenders as positive, even honorable personalities, men in whom value is allowed to accrete. They might be pretending, but the more time we spend with them, the truer and fuller they become. Let us begin at the point in these two plays when the freshly arrived “pretender” is receiving petitions. In Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, this is the first Polish scene. The Pretender meets a Catholic priest (to whom he promises the conversion of the Russian people to the Roman faith), then a Polish noble, a Russian defector, a rebel Cossack leader, and finally a poet whom he rewards for Latin verses. Dmitry has the same golden effect on all. He listens to each petitioner and to each promises exactly what is required to gain their respect and support. He literally creates himself in their image of him, before our eyes. This buoyantly “attractive adventurer,” as Pushkin called his Pretender, has been variously explained as the responsive spirit of poetic improvisation (a skill Pushkin greatly admired) or as a documented historical figure, Russia’s first genuinely clement prince and the original embodiment of the utopian myth of a resurrected returning tsarevich.23 Either way, Pushkin’s False Dmitry does not strike us as a fraud. Historically, of course, Russian regal pretenders were all “exposed” (the False Dmitry reigned for a year and was assassinated; Pugachov was caught and beheaded). But within art, Pushkin deals very generously with their risk-taking and openness to fate, granting it full legitimacy. Pretenders took on other people’s hopes and allowed them, for a time, to flourish. For Pushkin, samozvantstvo, “claiming for yourself a name not your own,” was “not theft, embezzlement, expropriation, but exchange.”24 Since pretenders don’t come with ready-made property, everything depends on inspiring trust and circulating it.
The opposite dynamic operatesinGogol. InTheGovernmentInspector,open-ness to an identity that is not one’s own has a bawdy, greedy, demonic quality to it. When a body is open, Russian folk wisdom teaches, mischief will crawl into it and everything begins to slip. Khlestakov – before he realizes that his mistaken identity can be turned to his advantage – is as frightened of going to jail as are
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the town officials, although for different reasons. The proper response of an audience to this devolving fiasco would be horror, released through a guffaw. Gogol was appalled at the stiffness of the 1836 premiere and insisted that the one positive character in the play had been overlooked: Laughter.
Pushkin’s and Gogol’s dramatic pretenders resemble each other in their restlessness, improvisatory skills, lightness, and ability to take on any number of verbal masks with no friction at the transitions. Khlestakov improvises, like Pushkin’s Dmitry, but with opposite valence: he is successful to the extent that he can take value away. The relevant “petitioning” scenes in The Government Inspector occur in Act IV.25 The officeholders of the town, in full dress uniform, haveturnedup to greet –and hopefullyto bribe – Khlestakov, who is sleeping off a sumptuous dinner at the Mayor’s house. At the end of Act III, in an intoxicated bravado, he had regaled the ladies of the house with a ballooning set of fibs about hislife in Petersburg: his dinners and balls, thedepartments that scramble to serve him, his casual visits to the imperial court, his intimacy with Pushkin, how he is begged by publishers to contribute stories and plays (various works attributed to others are all in fact his). Now, sensing no barriers and pursuing no aim, he pushes his identity in every possible direction. Khlestakov gets whatever he can get away with.
In Act IV, the Judge, Postmaster, School Inspector, Warden of Charities, and finally the landowners Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) drop by to “pay their respects.” The judge bungles his bribe and Khlestakov, surprised, picks up the money from the floor and asks to “borrow” it. This success emboldens him. He hits up the postmaster for a loan outright, and with each visitor the requested sum rises. Finally Khlestakov barks in the first breath at Bobchinsky / Dobchinsky: “Got any money on you? A thousand rubles?” Getting away with pretense simply speeds up the scam; it never creates weight, shame, or a public face. Since all parties are equally nervous and guilty, all play the same game of hide-and-seek.
Againstthe advice ofhismanservantOsip (“getout while thegoingisgood!”), Khlestakov lingers, as Chichikov will linger in Dead Souls. The playful masks begin to unravel – and what began as visitors with bribes becomes visitors with denunciations. Our false inspector slips out of town barely in time, just before the postmaster unseals Khlestakov’s letter to a Petersburg friend describing the fools he has fleeced. At this point, a stretch of dialogue occurs that superficially resembles the final moments of the eighteenth-century “self-corrective” comedies by Fonvizin and Knyazhnin, where evil caves in and is exposed to public ridicule. The mayor admits to his gullibility, calling himself an imbecile and blockhead. But Gogol supplies no Pravdin or Starodum to receive sinners’ confessions. Everyone is implicated. “What are you laughing at?” the enraged
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mayor shouts at the audience. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” This Gogol line of pretenders will inspire buffoons, rogues, madmen, and nihilists of a severity and hilarity undreamt of by Turgenev’s pure-minded Bazarov.
Pushkin fully appreciated Gogol’s gift and nourished it. When in 1834 Gogol wrote to the poet asking for a real Russian anecdote to work up into a comedy, Pushkin obliged with one about mistaken identity based on his own experience: the poet loved being on the road and was once taken for a government official himself. But Pushkin’s worldview was tethered to the aristocratic honor codes of his time. Remarkably, his criteria for honor remain stable regardless of the time and place: a military adventurer in 1604 or an illiterate Cossack rebel in 1774. Inhis historicaldrama, Pushkin presents Dmitry as false, but asuseful and enabling to others. Only once, when he tries to be “true” in his confession of love to the Polish princess Maryna Mniszech, does his confidence falter. Pugachov too acts confidently, at times even magnanimously. Pushkin’s pretenders have nothing to gain by running away and there is, in any event, nowhere for them to go; their stories are over.
For the two novels, The Captain’s Daughter and Dead Souls, our point of departure is precisely this question of running away. Taking on an identity, for Pushkin, entailed responsibility, because his plots tend to circle around and come home. Pushkin’s heroes might perform poetic improvisations, but they do not burst out to safety beyond the frame of the story, which is Gogol’s favored route. In Pushkin, getting away with pretense does create weight, and this qualifies the pretender, during his brief sojourn on stage or in history, to be taken seriously, treated eye to eye as an equal, as someone who understands honor and deserves it. In one of his face-to-face encounters with Grinyov,
