Lectures on Russian literature

'good' characters appear—the thrifty landowner, the saintly merchant, the God-like Prince, one has the impression of perfect strangers crowding in to take possession of a draughty house where familiar things stand in dismal disorder. As I have already mentioned, Chichikov's swindles are but the phantoms and parodies of crime, so that no 'real' retribution is possible without a distortion of the whole idea. The 'good people' are false because they do not belong to Gogol's world and thus every contact between them and Chichikov is jarring and depressing. If Gogol did write the redemption part with a 'good priest' (of a slightly Catholic type) saving Chichikov's soul in the depths of Siberia (there exist some scraps of information that Gogol studied Pallas'

Siberian Flora in order to get the right background), and if Chichikov was fated to end his days as an emaciated monk in a remote monastery, then no wonder that the artist, in a last blinding flash of artistic truth, burnt the end of Dead Souls.

Father Matthew could be satisfied that Gogol shortly before dying had renounced literature; but the brief blaze that might be deemed a proof and symbol of this renunciation happened to be exactly the opposite thing: as he crouched and sobbed in front of that stove ('Where?' queries my publisher. In Moscow.), an artist was destroying the labor of long years because he finally realized that the completed book was untrue to his genius; so Chichikov, instead of piously petering out in a wooden chapel among ascetic fir trees on the shore of a legendary lake, was restored to his native element; the little blue flames of a humble hell.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

'. . .a certain man who was, I daresay, not very remarkable: short he was and somewhat poxmarked and somewhat on the carroty side, and somewhat even blear-eyed and a little bald in front, with symmetrically wrinkled cheeks and the kind of complexion termed hemorrhoidal . . .

'... His name was Bashmachkin. Already the name itself clearly shows that it had formerly come from basbmak —a shoe.

But when, and at what time it had come from 'shoe,' this is totally unknown. All of them—the father and the grandfather, and even the brother-in-law—absolutely all the Bashmachkins—used to wear boots which they resoled not more often than three times a year.'

'The Overcoat' (1842)

Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange;

it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the

grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing

the reader's own notions of life. Great literature skirts the

irrational. Hamlet is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar.

Gogol's The Overcoat is a grotesque and grim nightmare

making black holes in the dim pattern of life. The

superficial reader of that story will merely see in it the

heavy frolics of an extravagant buffoon; the solemn reader

will take for granted that Gogol's prime intention was to

denounce the horrors of Russian bureaucracy. But neither

the person who wants a good laugh, nor the person who

craves for books 'that make one think' will understand

what The Overcoat is really about. Give me the creative

reader; this is a tale for him.

Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov

have all had their moments of irrational insight which

simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret

meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this

shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he

tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to

treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of

talent. When, as in his immortal The Overcoat, he really let

himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private

A page from Nabokov's lecture on 'The Overcoat'

abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet

with his drawing of a furred carrick.

produced.

The sudden slanting of the rational plane of life may be accomplished of course in many ways, and every great writer has his own method. With Gogol it was a combination of two movements : a jerk and a glide. Imagine a trap-door that opens under your feet with absurd suddenness, and a lyrical gust that sweeps you up and then lets you fall with a bump into the next traphole. The absurd was Gogol's favorite muse—but when I say 'the absurd,' I do not mean the quaint or the comic.

The absurd has as many shades and degrees as the tragic has, and moreover, in Gogol's case, it borders upon the latter. It would be wrong to assert that Gogol placed his characters in absurd situations. You cannot place a man in an absurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd; you cannot do this if you mean by 'absurd' something provoking a chuckle or a shrug. But if you mean the pathetic, the human condition, if you mean all such things that in less weird worlds are linked up with the loftiest aspirations, the deepest sufferings, the strongest passions—then of course the necessary breach is there, and a pathetic human, lost in the midst of Gogol's nightmarish, irresponsible world would be 'absurd,' by a kind of secondary contrast.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

On the lid of the tailor's snuff-box there was 'the portrait of a General; I do not know what general because the tailor's thumb had made a hole in the general's face and a square of paper had been gummed over the hole.' Thus with the absurdity of Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin. We did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be. The essence of mankind is irrationally derived from the chaos of fakes which form Gogol's world. Akaki Akakievich, the hero of The Overcoat, is absurd because he is pathetic, because he is human and because he has been engendered by those very forces which seem to be in such contrast to him.

He is not merely human and pathetic. He is something more, just as the background is not mere burlesque. Somewhere behind the obvious contrast there is a subtle genetic link. His being discloses the same quiver and shimmer as does the dream world to which he belongs. The allusions to something else behind the crudely painted screens, are so artistically combined with the superficial texture of the narration that civic-minded Russians have missed them completely. But a creative reading of Gogol's story reveals that here and there in the most innocent descriptive passage, this or that word, sometimes a mere adverb or a preposition, for instance the word 'even' or 'almost,' is inserted in such a way as to make the harmless sentence explode in a wild display of nightmare fireworks; or else the passage that had started in a rambling colloquial manner all of a sudden leaves the tracks and swerves into the irrational where it really belongs; or again, quite as suddenly, a door bursts open and a mighty wave of foaming poetry rushes in only to dissolve in bathos, or to turn into its own parody, or to be checked by the sentence breaking and reverting to a conjuror's patter, that patter which is such a feature of Gogol's style. It gives one the sensation of something ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner—and one likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant.

So what is that queer world, glimpses of which we keep catching through the gaps of the harmless looking sentences? It is in a way the real one but it looks wildly absurd to us, accustomed as we are to the stage setting that screens it. It is from these glimpses that the main character of The Overcoat, the meek little clerk, is formed, so that he embodies the spirit of that secret but real world