early as 1831, when he wrote down some sketches of the Petersburg landscape. It is a landscape of mists, pale colors, dim light, the opposite of his native province, and peopled mainly by government officials of various ranks, among whom Gogol singled out a certain type of petty clerk, the 'eternal titular councillor'-Mr. Poprishchin of 'The Diary of a Madman,' Akaky Akakievich of 'The Overcoat'-a type that became as perennial in Russian literature as the phantasmal city that somehow exudes him but will not house him.
Nothing stands still on Nevsky Prospect. People of various ranks appear, disappear, reappear in other guises, changing constantly with the light. 'The deceptive nature of reality,' as Sinyav-sky notes, 'is nowhere so openly and declaredly expressed by Gogol as in 'Nevsky Prospect.' It is not by chance that 'Nevsky Prospect' sets the tone for the other Petersburg tales.' The unusual structure of the tale underscores the theme, framing two opposite cases of deception with a more general evocation of the city's atmosphere. Interestingly, in a note published in The Contemporary, Pushkin (who did not live to read 'The Overcoat') called 'Nevsky Prospect' the fullest, the most complete of Gogol's tales.
The order of ranks is also revealed in these tales as a deception, a pure fiction. Major Kovalev, hero of 'The Nose,' is a 'collegiate assessor made in the Caucasus,' meaning made rather quickly. He was 'made' rather recently, as well, and is still quite proud of his advancement. One day his nose disappears and then turns up 'by himself' in the street wearing the uniform of a state councillor, a civil-service rank roughly equivalent to the military rank of general. Major Kovalev is not even sure of the proper way to address him. The fiction of ranks is also at the center of 'The Diary of a Madman.' Here, for instance, the awarding of a decoration is described from the family dog's point of view. The dog notices that her usually taciturn master has begun talking to himself, saying, 'Will I get it or won't I?' over and over again. A week later he comes home very happy:
All morning gentlemen in uniforms kept coming to him, congratulating him for something. At the table he was merrier than I'd ever seen him before, told jokes, and after dinner he held me up to his neck and said: 'Look, Medji, what's this?' I saw some little ribbon. I sniffed it but found decidedly no aroma; finally I licked it on the sly: it was a bit salty.
The keeper of the 'Diary,' Mr. Poprishchin, also broods on the question of rank, because he is unhappily in love with his chief's daughter, who is in love with a handsome kammerjunker:
Several times already I've tried to figure out where all these differences come from. What makes me a titular councillor and why on earth am I a titular councillor? Maybe I'm some sort of count or general and only seem to be a titular councillor? Maybe I myself don't know who I am… can't I be promoted this minute to governor general, or intendant, or something else like that? I'd like to know, what makes me a titular councillor? Why precisely a titular councillor?
In the end he decides he is the king of Spain, an act of perfect fic-tionizing for which he is taken off to the madhouse.
'The Diary of a Madman' is Gogol's only first-person story, and Mr. Poprishchin is perhaps the most human of his characters. For brief moments a piercing note comes into his voice, as when he asks, 'Why precisely a titular councillor?' or when he calls out his last words to his mother: 'Dear mother, save your poor son! shed a tear on his sick head! see how they torment him! press the poor orphan to your breast! there's no place for him in the world!' We hear the same note, more briefly still, in the voice of that other titular councillor, Akaky Akakievich, when his fellow clerks torment him unbearably and he finally says: 'Let me be. Why do you offend me?' There is something so strange, so pitiable in his voice that one young clerk never forgets it:
And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: 'Let me be. Why do you offend me?'-and in these penetrating words rang other words: 'I am your brother.' And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands…
These moments of pathos led certain radical critics of Gogol's time, the influential Vissarion Belinsky first among them, to see Gogol as a champion of the little man and an enemy of the existing social order. The same view later became obligatory for Soviet critics. But whatever semblance of social criticism or satire there may be in the Petersburg tales is secondary and incidental. The pathos is momentary, and Gogol packs his clerks off to the madhouse or out of this world with a remarkably cool hand.
The young Dostoevsky, in his first novel, Poor Folk, challenged Gogol's unfeeling treatment of his petty clerk. Dostoevsky's hero, Makar Devushkin, is also a titular councillor and clearly modeled on Akaky Akakievich. He lives by the same endless copying work and suffers the same humiliating treatment from his fellow clerks. But instead of being an automaton whose highest ideals are embodied in a new overcoat, Makar Devushkin is endowed with inner life, personal dignity, and the ability to love. He is also a writer of sorts, concerned with developing his own style. And he is a literary critic. Makar Devushkin reads Gogol's 'The Overcoat' and is offended: 'And why write such things? And why is it necessary?… Well, it's a nasty little book… It's simply unheard of, because it's not even possible that there could be such a civil servant. No, I will make a complaint… I will make a formal complaint.' Makar Devushkin shows the influence of sentimental French social novels on Russian literature of the 1840s. Nothing could be further from the spirit of such writing than Gogol's strange humor. The 'laughter through tears of sorrow' that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message. He saw the fiction of ranks not as an evil to be exposed but as an instance of the groundlessness of reality itself and of the incanta-tory power of words.
Gogol labored more over 'The Portrait' than over any of his other tales. The expanded second version was published seven years after the first, in the Collected Works of 1842. Belinsky considered it a total failure and thought he knew how it should have been written. He would have purified Gogol's 'realism' of what he considered its alien admixture of the fantastic, 'a childish fantas-magoria that could fascinate or frighten people only in the ignorant Middle Ages, but for us is neither amusing nor frightening, but simply ridiculous and boring.' He goes on to explain:
No, such a realization of the story would do no particular credit to the most insignificant talent. But the thought of the story would be excellent if the poet had understood it in a contemporary spirit: in Chartkov he wanted to portray a gifted artist who ruined his talent, and consequently himself, through greed for money and the fascination of petty fame. And the realization of this thought should have been simple, without fantastic whimsies, grounded in everyday reality: then Gogol, given his talent, would have created something great.
Belinsky's suggestion amounts to the negation of the artist Gogol and his replacement by a 'critical realist' of the dullest sort, a useful chicken instead of a bird of paradise. The contemporary spirit that Belinsky called for was of no interest at all to the author of 'The Portrait.' (A century later, in his little book on Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, though no disciple of Belinsky, offered a similarly rationalizing reduction of Gogol's work, rejecting all the fantastic tales as juvenilia and allowing as the real Gogol only 'The Overcoat,' The Inspector General, and the first part of Dead Souls. His criterion was not social utility, however, but artistic idiosyncrasy, an appeal to 'that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.') Gogol had a different understanding of the artist's task and of his temptation. The fantastic and the diabolical were always essential dimensions of his world, never more so than in 'The Portrait.'
He toiled over 'The Portrait' because it involved a judgment of his own work and its central question tormented him personally. It was not a question of the harmful influence of money or fame, but something more primitive and essential: the ambiguous power of the artistic image itself. And the more lifelike the image, the more perplexing the
