Lectures on Russian literature

Unfortunately, it involved the old lady too. At the barrier she embraced the pilgrim, broke into tears and made the sign of the cross over Gogol who responded effusively. At this moment papers were asked for: an official wanted to know who exactly was leaving. 'This little old lady,' cried Gogol, and rolled away in his carriage, leaving Madame Sheremetev in a very awkward position.

To his mother he sent a special prayer to be read in church by the local priest. In this prayer he begged the Lord to save him from robbers in the East and to spare him seasickness during the crossing. The Lord ignored the second request: between 38

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

Naples and Malta, on the capricious ship 'Capri,' Gogol vomited so horribly that 'the passengers marveled greatly.' The rest of the pilgrimage was singularly dim so that had there not been some official proof of its actual occurrence one might easily suppose that he invented the whole journey as he had formerly invented an excursion to Spain. When for years on end you have been telling people that you are going to do something and when you are sick of not being able to make up your mind, it saves a good deal of trouble to have them believe one fine day that you have done it already—and what a relief to be able to drop the matter.

'What can my dreamlike impressions convey to you? I saw the Holy Land through the mist of a dream. ' (From a letter to Zhukovski). We have a glimpse of him quarreling in the desert with Bazsili, his traveling companion. Somewhere in Samaria he plucked an asphodel, somewhere in Galilee a poppy (having a vague inclination for botany as Rousseau had). It rained at Nazareth, and he sought shelter, and was stranded there for a couple of hours 'hardly realizing that I was in Nazareth as I sat there' (on a bench under which a hen had taken refuge) 'just as I would have been sitting at some stage-coach station somewhere in Russia.' The sanctuaries he visited failed to fuse with their mystic reality in his soul. In result, the Holy Land did as little for his soul (and his book) as German sanatoriums had done for his body.

During the last ten years of his life, Gogol kept stubbornly brooding over the sequel to Dead Souls. He had lost the magic capacity of creating life out of nothing; his imagination needed some ready material to work upon for he still had the strength of repeating himself; although unable to produce a brand new world as he had done in the first part, he thought he could use the same texture and recombine its designs in another fashion, namely: in conformity with a definite purpose which had been absent from the first part, but which was now supposed not only to provide a new driving force, but also to endow the first part with a retrospective meaning.

Apart from the special character of Gogol's case, the general delusion into which he had lapsed was of course disastrous. A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?' Gogol decided that the purpose of literary art was to cure ailing souls by producing in them a sense of harmony and peace. The treatment was also to include a strong dose of didactic medicine. He proposed to portray national defects and national virtues in such a manner as to help readers to persever in the latter and rid themselves of the former. At the beginning of his work on the sequel his intention was to make his characters not 'wholly virtuous,' but 'more important' than those of Part One. To use the pretty slang of publishers and reviewers he wished to invest them with more 'human appeal.' Writing novels were merely a sinful game if the author's 'sympathetic attitude' towards some of his characters and a 'critical attitude' towards others, was not disclosed with perfect clarity. So clearly, in fact, that even the humblest reader (who likes books in dialogue form with a minimum of 'descriptions'—because conversations are 'life') would know whose side to take. What Gogol promised to give the reader —or rather the readers he imagined—were facts. He would, he said, represent Russians not by the 'petty traits' of individual freaks, not by 'smug vulgarities and oddities,' not through the sacrilegious medium of a lone artist's private vision, but in such a manner that 'the Russian would appear in the fullness of his national nature, in all the rich variety of the inner forces contained in him.' In other words the 'dead souls' would become 'live souls.'

It is evident that what Gogol (or any other writer having similar unfortunate intentions) is saying here can be reduced to much simpler terms 'I have imagined one kind of world in my first part, but now I am going to imagine another kind which will conform better to what I imagine are the concepts of Right and Wrong more or less consciously shared by my imaginary readers.' Success in such cases (with popular magazine novelists, etc.) is directly dependent on how closely the author's vision of 'readers' corresponds to the traditional, i.e. imaginary, notions that readers have of their own selves, notions carefully bred and sustained by a regular supply of mental chewing gum provided by the corresponding publishers.

But Gogol's position was of course not so simple, first because what he proposed to write was to be on the lines of a religious revelation, and second, because the imaginary reader was supposed not merely to enjoy sundry details of the revelation but to be morally helped, improved or even totally regenerated by the general effect of the book. The main difficulty lay in having to combine the material of the first part, which from a philistine's viewpoint dealt with 'oddities'

(but which Gogol had to use since he could no longer create a new texture), with the kind of solemn sermon, staggering samples of which he had given in the Selected Passages. Although his first intention was to have his characters not 'wholly virtuous' but 'important' in the sense of their fully representing a rich mixture of Russian passions, moods and ideals, he gradually discovered that these 'important' characters coming from under his pen were being adulterated by the 39

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

inevitable oddities that they borrowed from their natural medium and from their inner affinity with the nightmare squires of the initial set. Consequently the only way out was to have another alien group of characters which would be quite obviously and quite narrowly 'good' because any attempt at rich characterization in their case would be bound to lead to the same weird forms which the not 'wholly virtuous' ones kept assuming owing to their unfortunate ancestry.

When in 1847 Father Matthew, a fanatical Russian priest who combined the eloquence of John Chrysostom with the murkiest fads of the Dark Ages, begged Gogol to give up literature altogether and busy himself with devotional duties, such as preparing his soul for the Other World as mapped by Father Matthew and such like Fathers—Gogol did his best to make his correspondent see how very good the good characters of Dead Souls would be if only he was allowed by the Church to yield to that urge for writing which God had instilled in him behind Father Matthew's back: 'Cannot an author present, in the frame of an attractive story, vivid examples of human beings that are better men than those presented by other writers ? Examples are stronger than argumentations ; before giving such examples all a writer needs is to become a good man himself and lead the kind of life that would please God. I would never have dreamt of writing at all had there not been nowadays such a widespread reading of various novels and short stories, most of which are immoral and sinfully alluring, but which are read because they hold one's interest and are not devoid of talent. I too have talent—the knack of making nature and men live in my tales; and since this is so, must I not present in the same attractive fashion righteous and pious people living according to the Divine Law? I want to tell you frankly that this, and not money or fame, is my main incentive for writing.'

It would be of course ridiculous to suppose that Gogol spent ten years merely in trying to write something that would please the Church. What he was really trying to do was to write something that would please both Gogol the artist and Gogol the monk. He was obsessed by the thought that great Italian painters had done this again and again: a cool cloister, roses climbing a wall, a gaunt man wearing a skull-cap, the radiant fresh colors of the fresco he is working upon—these formed the professional setting which Gogol craved. Transmuted into literature, the completed Dead Souls was to form three connected images: Crime, Punishment, and Redemption. The attainment of this object was absolutely impossible not only because Gogol's unique genius was sure to play havoc with any conventional scheme if given a free hand, but because he had forced the main role, that of the sinner, upon a person—if Chichikov can be called a person—who was most ridiculously unfit for that part and who moreover moved in a world where such things as saving one's soul simply did not happen. A sympathetically pictured priest in the midst of the Gogolian characters of the first volume would have been as utterly impossible as a gauloiserie in Pascal or a quotation from Thoreau in Stalin's latest speech.

In the few chapters of the second part that have been preserved, Gogol's magic glasses become blurred. Chichikov though remaining (with a vengeance) in the center of the field somehow departs from the focal plane. There are several splendid passages in these chapters, but they are mere echoes of the first part. And when the