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'The unacknowledged writer ... without due portion, without response, without sympathy, like a homeless wayfarer, he will remain alone in mid-road.' Thus Gogol, in a moment of epic self-pity, depicts the fate of the author (that is, himself) who dares to tackle ignoble subjects in his writing. For a brilliant man, he was capable of extraordinarily bad judgement. In the century and a half since it was first published, Dead Souls has inspired a torrent of response - literary criticism from every angle: nationalist and internationalist, political and psychoanalytical, lyrical, mystical and stylistic. Still more impressive, Gogol is credited with founding a whole school in Russian literature - the school of non-classicists, of pessimists, portrayers of the grotesque, absurd and darkly comic. Dostoevsky himself is supposed to have claimed, 'We all crawled out from under Gogol's Overcoat.' Think of Saltykov-Schedrin, Bely, Nabokov, Bulgakov - according to this theory a Russian prose style would barely exist without Gogol.
Even this does not give an idea of the true extent of his influence. A critic commented in 1909, 'For many years we have all looked at the Ukraine and the Russia of Nicholas I through the Gogolian prism.' This 'Gogolian prism' - the eccentric, but astonishingly vivid and beguiling vision of Russia and the Russians which Gogol presents most fully in Dead Souls - can still be felt in the twenty-first century. It exists both as a sort of lens over Russian history (we cannot help but see St Petersburg and the Russian provinces as Gogol showed them to us) and as an important element in the Russian national self-image. Gogol's famous lines on Russia's destiny at the end of Dead Souls, part one, in which he portrays Russia as a troika speeding across the steppe, while 'looking askance, other peoples and nations step aside and make way for her', are so often quoted that they have become something of a talisman for Russians. In Moscow there are not just one but two statues of Gogol - a rare accolade for a writer.
Although... there's something terrible about statues of authors. Or rather, a statue is fine if you need to arrange a meeting-place with a friend, but it puts you right off reading any of the author's books. How could the prose of a monument be anything but stodgy? Yet if I turn my back on Gogol's legacy and instead open the first page of Dead Souls, what a delightful sensation creeps over me ... Here is Chichikov rolling into the provincial town that will remain nameless at the beginning of the novel. And close on his heels, in a flurry, come the cockroaches that peep out of the corners of his hotel room like prunes, and a roast chicken wrapped in dark blue paper, and a hot-drinks seller happily ensconced with a copper samovar, each as red and shiny as the other, and the servant Petrushka with his 'special odour', and a painting of 'a nymph with breasts so enormous the reader has probably never seen the like'. Detail is piled onto arresting detail, colour is splashed on straight from the tube, jokes jostle against more jokes, and not only do the town and all its inhabitants spring instantly to life, solid and bright as a merry-go-round, but I am bewitched. Monument or no monument, it's not a good idea to start reading Gogol if you want an early night.
The protagonist of Dead Souls, Collegiate Councillor Chichikov, is to outward appearances the consummate civil servant. There is little in Gogol, however, that conforms to outward appearances. Chichikov is running a scam, which exploits the fact that deaths among serfs (slaves in all but name by the nineteenth century) were not recorded between censuses. Landowners were taxed according to the number of serfs they owned. Chichikov reasons, therefore, that rather than continue to pay taxes on dead men, owners would be willing to sell him their 'dead souls', that is, re-register them in Chichikov's name as though they were still living. He will then be able raise a substantial mortgage from the State Bank on his non-existent serfs - and buy the country estate for which, like all civil servants, he yearns. The novel follows his travels from one landowner's estate to the next, as he bargains for the souls of dead peasants. He is the most bourgeois, be-suited little devil there ever was, in an Inferno that saw no harm in treating live people as a commodity.
The unfolding of Chichikov's shady business provides the mechanics of the novel, but from its first pages Dead Souls scarcely relies on its plot to hold the reader's attention. Chichikov may be a fraudster and a materialist, selfish through and through, but we can't help being charmed by him. He's so splendidly portly and well-laundered, so pleased with himself, with his hearty appetite, his predilection for post-prandial snoozes, and the mighty parp of his nose-blowing which earns him such respect from inn-servants. Here he is, caught unawares while at his toilette: 'He spent an inordinately long time lathering both cheeks with soap, while distending each in turn from the inside with his tongue. Then, pulling the towel off the inn-servant's shoulder, he used it to rub every part of his plump face, beginning behind the ears, after twice snorting straight into the inn-servant's face as a preliminary. Then he donned his shirt-front before the mirror, plucked two hairs protruding from his nose and directly thereafter appeared in a tail-coat of whortleberry red shot with a lighter weave...' The whortleberry red tail-coat, mentioned there for the first time, will be invoked by Gogol many times during the book. It becomes a part of the spell woven by Chichikov to enchant both his fictional counterparts and his readers.
We fall in love not only with Chichikov. The nameless provincial town is equally delightful. In a few dense paragraphs Gogol conjures up a sense both of unchanging tedium and of chaotic life teeming with untold stories: the tailor who calls himself 'Vasily Fyodorovich, Foreigner', and the sign for a billiard hall, with an illustration of players: 'cues at the ready, arms slightly cocked and feet poised in an aerial entrechat', beneath which runs the simple declaration: 'And this is the establishment.' Everywhere are incidental characters who claim our attention: a dandy on the first page in too-tight pantaloons, two men on a street corner conversing in the strangely authoritative manner of blokes with nothing to do ('Look at that there wheel! You think that wheel could make it as far as Moscow, or couldn't it?' 'It could. But not as far as Kazan, I bet.'); card-players at a ball, with their special names for the suits of cards: '"Spadeaholic! Spadeykins!" or even, simply "Spadey-bird!"'. Later, each of the landowner's estates is described with such astonishing inventiveness and wit, it makes me simply want to hug Gogol. Which is of course the basis for all those reams of critical studies and emulators. To read Gogol is to love him, and what is literary criticism but an elaborate, long-winded, and not always very eloquent expression of love?
Yet there are soon hints that this love affair will not be straightforward. The whole extraordinary world of Dead Souls is presented to us by a first-person narrator. At first we assume simply that he is Gogol, but he is so much a part of the text that he soon begins to seem fictitious. Boris Eikhenbaum suggests in his analysis of The Overcoat that everything in fiction 'is always a construct and a performance.' In the case of Dead Souls, we find Gogol performing the role of Gogol. He is just as much the hero of the piece as Chichikov, although he would never allow the readers to catch him at his ablutions. His tone may often be confessional; he may reveal to us his longing for the appetite and stomach of a 'gentleman of the middling sort,' or his difficulties in capturing a particular character on the page, and we may learn all about his love for travel and even his ultimate intentions for the book - 'from an ignoble picture to fashion a pearl of creation'. These confessions are always partial, however, and serve in many ways only to make his secretiveness elsewhere the more unexpected, even jarring. He is ambiguous and inconsistent, and has a habit of alluding in a sort of stage whisper to the activities of the female characters, and then refusing to explain himself. In the case of Manilov's wife, for example, he hints twice that she has some monstrous failing - bad breath, perhaps, or psychotic attacks - and then suddenly comes over all coy: '... I confess that about ladies I am very much afraid to say anything, and besides, it's time for me to return to our heroes...' It's a wonderful comic ploy but oh, it is infuriating.
In life, Gogol kept clear of 'the ladies' just as he did in prose. Desperately self-conscious of his appearance - in particular his long, thin nose - he made a running joke throughout his fiction and his correspondence of noses of every shape and form. The closest he seems to have come to falling in love was with a young man in Rome whom Gogol nursed throughout his final illness. With women he could be charming, playing the part of the famous author and wit, but he was careful to preserve his distance. Otherwise he tended to adopt a bossy, moralising tone, as he had done from an early age with his mother and sisters - lecturing them not only on spiritual matters but on housekeeping and finances, areas in which he could have shown a little humility.
Yet on the page - let's not mince our words - Gogol is a tease, a seducer of the most shameless kind. He takes such trouble to ensnare his readers, drawing them in with his charm, his wonderful funniness, his good-humour, the delicious vividness and sharpness of the worlds he creates. He plays different roles for different readers: the sentimental, the ironic, the melodramatic - they will all find something in Gogol. Soon they are longing to crawl into his literary bed and know everything about him. But like all seducers, he is not offering intimacy. For him the result is the performance itself, the successful suspension of his audience's disbelief. However many times I read Gogol I still catch myself thinking, 'But his editor shouldn't have allowed him to leave us dangling like that.' I am the lovesick girl who refuses to believe the affair is over: it seems impossible that he hasn't hidden the answers in there somewhere, underneath the antheap of details.
Gogol is not usually described as a Casanova. In fact the poor man is probably shuddering in his grave at the thought. But the comparison does perhaps highlight the fact that Gogol was first and foremost a writer; he was much more comfortable - perhaps because he was more in control - on the page than in life. In life, as already mentioned, Gogol was happy to play a part, but it was harder to keep control of the drama - the other actors would insist on improvising. This was especially true on the occasions when Gogol's imagination ran away with him and he would suddenly change roles, often from week to week. As a young man in 1829 he published a long poem, Hans Kuchelgarten, to bad reviews. Mortified, he left St Petersburg for Germany, claiming in a letter to his mother that he was fleeing due to his unrequited love for a woman with 'a radiant face'. He drew a vivid picture of the suffering of a lover, which, however, he instantly forgot, and in his next letter told her that the main reason he had come to Germany was for his health. His mother not unnaturally concluded from these two strange missives that her son had caught a venereal disease. Gogol was mortified. He never assumed the role of distraught lover again, but later in life he would present himself as a professor planning a nine-volume work on Ukrainian history and an impassioned teacher. Both ideas were soon forgotten. He was a Slavophile in the Slavophile camp and a reformer to the liberals. His behaviour, which was at times frankly bizarre, left him increasingly isolated and anxious.
Within the pages of Dead Souls, however, Gogol could fulfil many of the ambitious goals he set himself. He could speak as a prophet to his fellow Russians; he could simultaneously use the blade of his irony against the corruption of the Tsarist system and describe in breath-taking prose the grandeur and beauty of Russia and its people; above all he could inhabit the role to which he was perhaps best suited - the purveyor of brilliant, absurdist wit who can with a twist of his pen transform everyday life into a carnival. Each of these performances is carried off with both subtlety and bravado; where a lesser author would simply seem manipulative, Gogol achieves such mastery over his readers that they are ready to swallow any number of abrupt changes in tone, of high rhetoric followed by bathos and burlesque dressed up as a moral tale.
The seduction process is in fact almost too effective: Gogol leaves behind him a trail of readers obsessed with discovering the real man behind the performance. Freudian critics are certain that his ellipses and inconsistencies hint at his complexes: in their eyes Gogol is an 'anal erotic' exploring the horrors of his subconscious in fiction. The Symbolists think Gogol is one of them - aiming, through snatched glimpses, to show that other reality which lies beneath the surface of material life. For nineteenth century reformers he was a critic of the Tsarist system; for twentieth century modernists he is a forerunner of their fragmented, self-referential approach. In short, everyone claims him as their own: they love him, he must surely return their love.
Bely claimed that in Gogol's writing, 'nothing exists without design'. This may be true, although it seems a lot to ask of any writer. But it makes the job of the Gogol critic a dangerous one. Marxists, theologians, Ukrainian nationalists - all are drawn deeper and deeper into the forest of objects, names, details, digressions to shore up their arguments. Footnotes flourish; humour is lost in undergrowth of academic apparatus. All is sacrificed to the quest for the design. There is something very close to madness in this hyper-detailed approach to literary criticism. In fact one can imagine a Gogolian story on the subject: The Diary of the Expert on Gogol. For the rest of us, the non-academics, let their example stand as a warning. Take care when you fall in love with Gogol.
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