The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

478 Pages·1998·1.53 MB·English

by  Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

THE COLLECTED TALES
OF NIKOLAI GOGOL
Translated and Annotated by
RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
FIRST VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, JULY 1999
ISBN: 0679430237

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Preface
Art has the provinces in its blood. Art is provincial in principle, preserving for
itself a naive, external, astonished and envious outlook.
-Andrei Sinyavsky, In Gogol's Shadow
Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol was born on April 1, 1809, in the village of
Sorochintsy, Mirgorod district, Poltava province, in the Ukraine, also known as
Little Russia. His childhood was spent on Vassilyevka, a modest estate
belonging to his mother. Nearby was the town of Dikanka, once the property of
Kochubey, the most famous hetman of the independent Ukraine. In the church of
Dikanka there was an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, for whom Gogol
was named.
In 1821 Gogol was sent to boarding school in Nezhin, near Kiev. He graduated
seven years later, and in December 1828, at the age of nineteen, left his native
province to try his fortunes in the Russian capital. There he fled from posts as a
clerk in two government ministries, failed a tryout for the imperial theater (he
had not been a brilliant student at school, but had shown unusual talent as a
mimic and actor, and his late father had been an amateur playwright), printed at
his own expense a long and very bad romantic poem, then bought back all the
copies and burned them, and in 1830 published his first tale, "St. John's Eve," in
the March issue of the magazine Fatherland Notes. There followed, in
September 1831 and March 1832, the two volumes of Evenings on a Farm near
Dikanka, each containing four tales on Ukrainian themes with a prologue by
their supposed collector, the beekeeper Rusty Panko. They were an immediate
success and made the young provincial a famous writer.
Baron Delvig, friend and former schoolmate of the poet Alexander Pushkin and
editor of the almanac Northern Flowers, had introduced Gogol to Pushkin's
circle even before that, and in 1831 he had made the acquaintance of the poet
himself. Writing to Pushkin on August 21 of that year, Gogol told him how his
publisher had gone to the shop where the first volume of Evenings was being
printed and found the typesetters all laughing merrily as they set the book.
Shortly afterwards, Pushkin mentioned the incident in one of the first published
notices of Gogol's work, a letter to the editor of a literary supplement, which
began: "I have just read Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. It amazed me. Here
is real gaiety—honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And
in places what poetry! What sensitivity! All this is so unusual in our present-day
literature that I still haven't recovered." At twenty-two Gogol was well launched
both in literature and in society.
In 1835 came Mirgorod, another two-volume collection of Ukrainian tales, and
Arabesques, a group of articles and tales reflecting the life of Petersburg,
including "Nevsky Prospect," "The Diary of a Madman," and the first version of
"The Portrait." By then Gogol had also begun work on the novel-poem Dead
Souls. When Pushkin began to publish his magazine The Contemporary in 1836,
he included tales by Gogol in the early issues—"The Carriage" in the first and
"The Nose" in the third. April of that same year saw the triumph of his comedy
The Inspector General.
In June 1836, at the height of his fame, Gogol left Russia for Switzerland, Paris,
and Rome.
Of the remaining sixteen years of his life, he would spend nearly twelve abroad.
He returned in the fall of 1841 to see to the publication of the first volume of
Dead Souls. When the book finally appeared in May 1842, its author again left
the country, this time for a stretch of six years. Later in 1842, a four-volume
edition of Gogol's collected writings (minus Dead Souls) was brought out in
Petersburg. Among the previously unpublished works in the third volume was
his last and most famous tale, "The Overcoat." By then, though he was to live
another ii
Preface
decade, his creative life was virtually over. It had lasted some twelve years. And
in terms of his tales alone, it had been even briefer, condensed almost entirely
into the period between his arrival in Petersburg and his first trip abroad in 1836.
The road that brought Gogol from the depths of Little Russia intersected with
Nevsky Prospect, "all-powerful Nevsky Prospect," in the heart of the capital. His
art was born at that crossroads. It had the provinces in its blood, as Andrei
Sinyavsky puts it, in two senses: because Little Russia supplied the setting and
material for more than half of his tales, and, more profoundly, because even in
Petersburg, Gogol preserved a provincials "naive, external, astonished and
envious outlook." He did not write from within Ukrainian popular tradition, he
wrote looking back at it. Yet he also never entered into the life of the capital, the
life he saw flashing by on Nevsky Prospect, where "the devil himself lights the
lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks"—this enforced,
official reality of ministries and ranks remained impenetrable to him. Being on
the outside of both worlds, Gogol seems to have been destined to become a
"pure writer" in a peculiarly modern sense.
And indeed Gogol's art, despite its romantic ghosts and folkloric trappings, is
strikingly modern in two ways: first, his works are free verbal creations, based
on their own premises rather than on the conventions of ninteenth-century
fiction; and, second, they are highly theatrical in presentation, concentrated on
figures and gestures, constructed in a way that, while admitting any amount of
digression, precludes the social and psychological analysis of classical realism.
His images remain ambiguous and uninterpreted, which is what makes them
loom so large before us. These expressive qualities of Gogol's art influenced
Dostoevsky decisively, turning him from a social romantic into a "fantastic
realist," and they made Gogol the father of Russian modernism. His leap from
the province to the capital also carried him forward in time, so that, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, the symbolist Andrei Bely could say: "We
still do not know what Gogol is."
A vogue for Little Russia already existed when Gogol arrived in the capital. The
novelist Vassily Narezhny (1780-1825) had recently published two comic novels
portraying Ukrainian life and customs— The Seminarian (1824) and The Two
Ivans, or The Passion for Lawsuits (1825). In 1826 a leading romantic of
Ukrainian origin, Orest Somov (1793—1833), had begun to publish a series of
tales based on the folklore of the region. And Anton Pogorelsky (1787—
1836), superintendent of the Kharkov school district, had used a Ukrainian
setting for a volume of fantastic tales entitled The Double, or My Evenings in
Little Russia (1829). The province offered an ideal combination of the native and
the exotic, the real and the fantastic, peasant earthiness and pastoral grace. The
landscape of Little Russia is open steppe, not the forests of the north; the climate
is sunny, warm, southern, conducive to laziness and merrymaking; the earth is
abundant; the cottages, built not of logs but of cob or whitewashed brick, are
sunk in flourishing orchards; the men wear drooping mustaches, grow long
topknots on their shaved heads, and go around in bright-colored balloon trousers.
Here was a whole culture, with its heroic past of successful struggle against the
Turks on one side and the Poles on the other, that could be taken as an
embodiment of the Russian national spirit. And so it was taken in the Petersburg
of the 1820s.
Gogol, however, seems to have paid little attention to the details of Ukrainian
life while he lived there. He was bent on putting the place behind him, on
winning glory in the capital, on performing some lofty deed for the good of all
Russia, on becoming a great poet in the German romantic style (the title of his
burnt poem was Hans Kuchelgarten). It was only in Petersburg that he
discovered the new fashion for the Ukraine and sensed, in Sinyavsky's words, "a
'social commission' from that side, a certain breath of air in the literary lull of the
capital, already sated with the
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The Collected Tales Of Nikolai Gogol

Caucasus and mountaineers and expecting something brisk, fresh, popular from
semi-literate Cossackland." Four months after his arrival, on April 30, 1829, he
wrote to his mother: You know the customs and ways of our Little Russians very
well, and so I'm sure you will not refuse to communicate them to me in our
correspondence. That is very, very necessary for me. I expect from you in your
next letter a complete description of the costume of a village deacon, from his
underclothes to his boots, with the names used by the most rooted, ancient,
undeveloped Little Russians; also the names, down to the last ribbon, for the
various pieces of clothing worn by our village maidens, as well as by married
women, and by muzhiks.. the exact names for clothing worn in the time of the
hetmans. . a minute description of a wedding, not omitting the smallest detail. . a
few words about carol singing, about St. John's Eve, about water sprites. There
are lots of superstitions, horror stories, traditions, various anecdotes, and so on,
current among the people: all of that will be of great interest to me. .
So it was with the help of his mother's memory, plus a few books of local history
and old Ukrainian epic songs, that Gogol set about creating the Little Russia of
Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod.
It is a world of proud, boastful Cossacks, of black-browed beauties, of witches,
devils, magic spells and enchantments, of drowsy farms and muddy little towns
—that is, a stage-set Ukraine, more operatic than real. Holidays and feasting are
always close by—in "St. John's Eve"
and "The Night Before Christmas" obviously, but also in the wedding that begins
"The Terrible Vengeance," in the banqueting that runs through the Mirgorod tales
and appears again in "The Carriage," a perfect little anecdote that belongs to this
same world. Festive occasions grant special privileges; on festive nights fates are
revealed or decided, lovers are separated, enemies are brought together; the
natural and the supernatural mingle for good or ill, for comic or horrific effect.
The expanded possibilities of festive reality justified the freedom with which
Gogol constructed his narratives. But of the real peasant, of conditions under
serfdom, of Ukrainian society and its conflicts at the time, there is no more trace
in Gogol's tales, even those of the most realistic cast, than there was in his
father's comedies. His characters, as Michel Aucouturier notes in the preface to
his French translation of Evenings, "are not typical representatives of the Little
Russian peasantry, but the young lovers and old greybeards of the theater,
Ukrainian descendants of the Cleantes and Elises, the Orgons and Gerontes of
Moliere."
The more surprising is the reputation Gogol acquired early, among both
conservatives and liberals, as a painter of reality, the founder of the "natural
school." Gogol's appearance in Russian literature was so enigmatic that it seems
his first critics (Pushkin excepted), while they liked what they read, could not
account for their liking of it and invented reasons that were simply beside the
point. The real reason was no doubt the unusual texture of Gogol's writing.
His prose is a self-conscious artistic medium that mimics the popular manner but
in fact represents something other, something quite alien to the old art of
storytelling.
In his essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Walter Benjamin wrote: "Experience
passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have
drawn." And he noted further that "every real story contains, openly or covertly,
something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in
another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case
the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. . Counsel woven into the
fabric of real life is wisdom." If we turn to Gogol's tales with such words as
"experience," "practical advice," "counsel," and "wisdom" in mind, we will see
that they are total strangers to the "real story" as Benjamin defines it. Memory is
the medium of storytelling, both in the experience that is passed on from mouth
to mouth and in the storyteller's act of telling, which is always a retelling.
Though he may vary the tale each time he tells it, he will iv
Preface
insist that he is faithfully repeating what he heard from earlier storytellers;
otherwise it would be something made up, a fiction, a lie. Memory is the
storyteller's authority, the Muse-derived element of his art. He has the whole
tale, the plot, the sequence of events, even the embellishments, in mind before he
tells it. Gogol, we might say, has nothing in mind. Memory plays no part in his
work. He does not know where the act of writing will lead him. In other words,
he belongs not to the order of tradition but to the order of invention. And his best
inventions come to him in the writing; he happens upon them— Ivan
Fyodorovich Shponka's dream, for instance, which is so unexpected and so
transcends the rest of the story that he simply breaks off after it. Hence his way
of proceeding by digressions, which often turn out to be the main point of the
tale; hence his scorn for the accepted rules of art—unity of action, logical
development, formal coherence—and his avoidance of "meaning" and
motivation. The discovery of the unaccountable, of the absence of an experience
to be passed on, left him permanently surprised. His work was the invention of
forms to express it.
If we take what might seem the most traditional of Gogol's tales—"The Terrible
Vengeance," for example, or "Viy" (which Gogol calls a "folk legend" and
claims to retell almost as simply as he heard it)—we will see that their procedure
is precisely antitraditional. "The Terrible Vengeance," far from being a naive
epic tale of Cossack life, is a studied imitation of the epic manner, a conscious
experiment in rhythmic prose, with inevitable elements of parody and a quite
unconvincing pathos. No folktale or epic song would end with what amounts to
its own prologue, explaining the action after the fact. The structure is highly
artificial and peculiarly Gogolian (it occurs again in "The Portrait" and in the
first part of Dead Souls), showing his concern with the act of composition and
his unconcern with meaning. So, too, in folktales about Ivan the Fool, the hero
traditionally undergoes three tests and wins the beautiful daughter in the end.
Gogol's "Viy" belongs to the same general type, but the daughter is hardly a
prize, and the hero, Khoma Brut, comes to a sorry and quite untraditional end.
What makes these stories are countless unpredictable incidents, details, and turns
of phrase scattered along the way, and such bravura passages as the famous
description of the Dnieper River in "The Terrible Vengeance," the erotic
rendering of Khoma Brut's flight with the witch, and the tremendous finale of the
tale with the appearance out of nowhere of the monster Viy (who, incidentally,
has no source in folklore; he is Gogol's creature and appears literally out of
nowhere).
Of this untraditional procedure Sinyavsky writes:
. .the accent shifts from the object of speech to speech as a process of objectless
intent, interesting in itself and exhausted by itself. Information that is a priori
contentless shifts our attention from the material to the means of its verbal
organization. Speech about useless objects enters consciousness as a thing, as a
ponderable mass, as a fact of language valuable in itself. That is why we
perceive Gogol's prose so distinctly as prose, and not as a habitual manner and
generally accepted form of putting thoughts into words, nor as an appendix to
the content and subject of the story. It has its content and even, if you wish, its
subject in itself—
this prose which steps forth in the free image of speech about facts not worth
mentioning, speech in a pure sense about nothing.
If there is still a mimicry of traditional storytelling in a number of the earlier
Ukrainian tales, in others we see much more clearly this shift to "a process of
objectless intent," to
"speech... about nothing" —particularly in "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His
Aunt," the last written of the Evenings, and in "Old World Landowners" and
"The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" from
Mirgorod. The element of the supernatural that triggers events in the other
Ukrainian tales is almost entirely absent from "Shponka" and
"Landowners." Almost, but not quite: Shponka's dream of the multiplying wife,
and the she-cat v

The Collected Tales Of Nikolai Gogol

that precipitates the end of the otherwise endless banality of the landowners'
existence, are decisive incursions of the supernatural, or the other-natural, into
the idyllic placidity of Little Russian farm life. In the story of the two Ivans,
however, nothing of the sort happens, and the quarrel of the two friends proves
unresolvable. The narrator ends with a dispirited exclamation: "It's dull in this
world, gentlemen!" Beneath the unbroken surface of this banal local anecdote
(there was in fact such an inseparable, litigious pair living in the town of
Mirgorod) some extraordinary transformation should be about to happen, some
new reality should be about to appear. For Gogol, the non-occurrence of this
transformation became the most "supernatural" subject of all. He developed it in
Dead Souls.
In the Petersburg tales the unaccountable sits squarely in the midst of things, like
Major Kovalev's nose in the barber's loaf of bread. "Petersburg has no character,"
Gogol wrote to his mother in 1829, "the foreigners fattening themselves here no
longer resemble foreigners, and the Russians in turn have become some sort of
foreigners here and are no longer either the one or the other." Where identity is
so fluid, memory finds nothing to grasp, no experience is durable enough to be
passed on. The phantasmal Petersburg of later Russian literature—of
Dostoevsky, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely—made its first appearance in
"Nevsky Prospect," the idea for which came to Gogol as 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 Sinyavsky 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.