Pugachov explains the morality he lives by in terms of an ancient Kalmyk tale. It is better, the pretender says, to live thirty-three years on fresh blood like the eagle than three hundred years on carrion like the raven. To which Grinyov responds: “Clever. But in my opinion, to live by murder and plunder is the same as pecking carrion.” Both men fall silent. Not only does each live by his own truth, which is beyond the other’s judgment, but only by speaking one’s truth can a life be saved – one’s own, or another’s.
In Chapter 8,Pugachovdemandsthat GrinyovrecognizehimasTsar PeterIII. “Judge for yourself,” Grinyov responds. “You’re a sharp-witted person: you’d be the first to realize that I was faking . . . I swore allegiance to her Majesty the Empress; I cannot serve you.”26 Pugachov is impressed by this sincerity (by this willingness to ignore hierarchy and address him eye to eye) and sets Grinyov free. A similar exchange occurs in Chapter 12. Pugachov has just liberated Masha Mironova from the clutches of the villain and traitor Shvabrin.
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The humiliated Shvabrin reveals that Masha is not the priest’s niece, as had been claimed, but the Captain’s daughter. Pugachov turns angrily to Grinyov, who again decides to tell the truth. “Judge for yourself. Could I have declared in front of your men that Mironov’s daughter was alive? They would have torn her to pieces” (p. 340). Pugachov bursts into laughter, agrees, and sets both Grinyov and his sweetheart free. These conversations resemble displays of honor between equals, between two enlightened noblemen – not an exchange between a young high-born officer and an illiterate Cossack rebel. To be sure equality does not mean endorsement. At no point, note, does Grinyov approve of Pugachov, his rebellion, or his wanton violence. But close up they speak the same language. They have nothing to conceal and can easily default to a language of trust. Such clarity and truth- telling will be interpreted, on the institutional level, as treason.
What, finally, about the pretender Chichikov in
After the ruin of Plyushkin,the roadstops. Chichikov lingersintown, nursing a slight cold, and now that he has stopped traveling, words about him begin to gather and stick. Ominous rumors circulate about his identity: is he a ravisher of maidens, perhaps Napoleon in disguise, perhaps even the Antichrist? By the time he bursts out of the story, Chichikov has become so encrusted with ludicrous pseudo-identities that his actual biography – if we believe the form in which Gogol provides it in the final chapter – is somehow dissatisfying, intolerably drab.
The moment of Chichikov’s escape takes place in some indescribable realm. Deflated, disgraced, he is in his carriage heading out of town. Suddenly the carriage becomes a troika, flying up and down hillocks:
Chichikov merely kept smiling, jouncing a little on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian doesn’t love fast driving? How should his soul, which yearns to go off into a whirl, to go off on a fling, to say on occasion: “Devil take it all!” – how should his soul fail to love it? Is it not a thing to be loved, when one can sense in it something exaltedly wondrous? Some unseen power, it seems, has caught you up on its wing, and you’re flying yourself, and all other things are flying . . .27
The authentic new hero has become movement itself, the boundless Russian space into which Chichikov escapes, bleak, dingy, dispersed – as Nabokov writes, “Russia as Gogol saw Russia” (p. 107). Nabokov then adds that for Gogol, Russia was “a peculiar landscape, a special atmosphere, a symbol, a long, long road.” The bursting- out along this road need not be strictly linear; both geographically and stylistically, it can be a zigzag or a swirl. Digressions, hyperbolic metaphors and brokenidioms can twist in a moment’s time from the grotesque to the pious, fromthe pious to the insane. Whatever principles govern the brilliantly excessive verbiage of Gogol’s prose, they represent the opposite of Pushkin’s, which were, we recall, “precision, brevity, ideas and more ideas.” “The prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional,” Nabokov says crisply; “that of Gogol is four-dimensional, at least” (p. 145).
What can be said in summary of these two very different worlds and legacies, Pushkin’s and Gogol’s? Pushkin certainly knew anguish and the impulse to escape. But part of being an aristocrat meant avoiding plots based on comic “impersonations upward” by people of low rank. His own “poor clerk” Evgeny from
Gogol does not do genteel pastoral masquerades of this sort. His material is more voluble, patchy, and vulnerable. It takes the form of the miserable private madness of poor Poprishchin in
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of little use to Dostoevsky, except as a ‘Golden Age’ recalled in childhood or projected into a utopian dream. The first realm of Gogol’s that Dostoevsky will appropriate is the painful, embarrassed world of the ambitious poor clerk who insists that he cannot be the person he knows he really is – but unlike Gogol’s timid little men, these characters will find some other person, or some theory, to blame for it.
In fact, so brilliantly did Dostoevsky apply his new devices of psychological prose to Gogol’s flattened world that Gogol himself was somewhat eclipsed.28 In part this was due to Gogol’s confusing ideological profile: his final published book,
Pushkin’s posthumous life is another story. Beginning in the mid-1850s, he became an idol and a myth. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy cultivated a special relationship with Russia’s premiere poet. In 1880, at the unveiling of a statue to the poet in Moscow, Dostoevsky delivered a speech declaring Pushkin a national prophet, the savior and beacon of his people, and his fictive heroes a force for moral good – in terms that would have stunned the poet, but that electrified the audience. Tolstoy, in every way Pushkin’s equal as an aristocrat, was not present at the ceremony (Turgenev had invited him to speak but Tolstoy politely declined; he disapproved of jubilees, for others and for himself). Tolstoy was the first major Russian writer not to pass through the Romantic school. “Read
