question. The ambition to achieve a perfect likeness might go beyond the artist's control and bring into the world something he never intended. Thus the portrait in Gogol's tale looks back at its viewers, looks back with the eyes of the Antichrist whose life it has magically prolonged. The corrupting power of the gold it bestows on its new purchaser, the painter Chartkov, is only a secondary effect, an extension of the evil present in the painted image itself. The question the tale explores is whether art is sacramental or sacrilegious, godlike or diabolical, and at what point it may change from one to the other. Some years later, in 1847, Gogol wrote a letter to his father confessor in which he declared himself 'guilty and cursed' not only for having portrayed the devil, which he had done with the intention of mocking him, and not only for having painted nothing but grotesque images, being unable to describe a positive character properly, but first of all for having attemped to re-create each thing 'as alive as a painter from life.' In 'The Portrait,' the terms of this self-condemnation were already embodied dramatically.
Nature is always doubled by the supernatural in Gogol's tales, and the ordinary is always open to the assaults of the extraordinary. The reality of the capital is a closed fiction, an unrelieved banality, but filled with gigantic, unexpected forces, like the huge fist 'the size of a clerk s head' that suddenly comes at Akaky Akakievich out of the darkness. If Akaky Akakievich transgressed the order of things by desiring a new overcoat (by desiring anything at all), and is punished most terribly for it in the phantasmal world of Petersburg, he also returns as a phantom himself and has his revenge. He momentarily becomes one of those unexpected forces, robs the important person of his overcoat, frightens a policeman away with 'such a fist… as is not to be found even among the living,' and, having grown much taller, vanishes completely into the darkness of night.
Gogol was made uneasy by his works. They detached themselves from him and lived on their own, producing effects he had not foreseen and that sometimes dismayed him. He would write commentaries after the fact, trying to reduce them to more commonplace and acceptable dimensions. But their initial freedom stayed with them. It was inherent in his method of composition, and in his astonishing artistic gift-astonishing first of all to himself.
Richard Pevear
TRANSLATORS' NOTE
Th is translation has been made from the Russian text of the six-volume Khudozhestvennaya Literatura edition (Moscow,
We have arranged the tales in the order of their composition. They include four of the eight tales from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-32): 'St. John's Eve' from the first volume, and 'The Night Before Christmas,' 'The Terrible Vengeance,' and 'Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt' from the second. We have eliminated the forewords of the beekeeper Rusty Panko, but kept his footnotes, as well as the author's, for individual stories. We include three of the four tales from the two volumes of Mirgorod (1835), omitting only 'Taras Bulba.' Of the Petersburg tales (1835- 42; the collective title is not Gogol's but has become traditional), we include all except 'Rome.' 'The Carriage' is a slight anomaly in this group but belongs to the same period. We give the expanded 1842 version of 'The Portrait.'
The question of rank is of central importance to the Petersburg tales. The following is the table of the civil service ranks as established by the emperor Peter the Great in 1722, with their military equivalents:
Chancellor
The rank of titular councillor conferred personal nobility; the rank of actual state councillor made it hereditary.
St. John's Eve
A True Story Told by the Beadle of the - Church
Foma Grigorievich WAS known to have this special sort of quirk: he mortally disliked telling the same thing over again. It sometimes happened, if you talked him into telling something a second time, that you'd look and he'd throw in some new thing or change it so it was unrecognizable. Once one of those gentlemen-it's hard for us simple folk to fit a name to them: writers, no, not writers, but the same as the dealers at our fairs: they snatch, they cajole, they steal all sorts of stuff, and then bring out booklets no thicker than a primer every month or week-one of those gentlemen coaxed this same story out of Foma Grigorievich, who then forgot all about it. Only there comes this same young sir from Poltava in a pea-green caftan, whom I've already mentioned and one of whose stories I think you've already read, toting a little book with him, and opening it in the middle, he shows it to us. Foma Grigorievich was just about to saddle his nose with his spectacles, but remembering that he'd forgotten to bind them with thread and stick it down with wax, he handed the book to me. Having a smattering of letters and not needing spectacles, I began to read. Before I had time to turn two pages, he suddenly grabbed my arm and stopped me.
'Wait! first tell me, what's that you're reading?'
I confess, I was a bit taken aback by such a question. 'What's this I'm reading, Foma Grigorievich? Why, your true story, your very own words.'
'Who told you those are my words?'
'What better proof, it's printed here: told by the beadle So-and- so.'
'Spit on the head of the one who printed it! He's lying, the dad-blasted Muscovite! Did I say that? The devil it's the same! He's got a screw loose! Listen, I'll tell it to you now.'
