Exploring Gogol

Robert A. Maguire

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780804765329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire russe

For the past 150 years, critics have referred to 'the Gogol problem', by which they mean their inability to account for a life and work that are puzzling, often opaque, yet have proved consistently fascinating to generations of readers. This book proceeds on the assumption that Gogol's life and work, in all their manifestations, form a whole; it identifies, in ways that have eluded critics to date, the rhetorical strategies and thematic patterns that create the unity. These larger concerns emerge from a close study of the major texts, fictional and nonfictional, and in turn are set in a broad artistic and intellectual context, Russian and European, with special attention to German philosophy, the visual arts, and Orthodox Christian theology.

PART ONE

PLACE

1

Bounded Space

PROSE presupposes place. Writer and reader require a sense of topography, however rudimentary, within a prose text, even in the most artless forms like the office memorandum, the letter, the diary entry. There a mere specification of date, time, and locale may suffice. Fiction must work harder to create the necessary semblance of ordinariness, which is then explored, as in realism, or departed from, as in fantasy and the grotesque, sometimes in more detail, as in the novel, sometimes in less, as in the short story. Much depends on genre, convention, and authorial predilection.

And much depends on cultural imperatives as well. For Russians, one of the most powerful and enduring imperatives has been a fear of disorder or placelessness, and a corresponding need for structure and discipline. The account of the founding of the Russian state, under the years 860-62 in the Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let, twelfth century), tells of a society in such disarray that the inhabitants turn to foreigners, the Varangians, with the following request: “Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.” By the twelfth century, an ordered society had been created, but it was under constant threat from disruptive forces, internal as well as external. The greatest work of old Russian literature, The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve, 1187), records one instance that was to become paradigmatic. Four princes, among them Igor, leave their towns and set out for the open steppes beyond the Donets River to do battle with the Kumans, or Polovetsians. These nomads had been defeated a year earlier by Igor’s cousin; now Igor himself, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, “was moved by the spirit of rash emulation in undertaking his own expedition without consulting the senior prince.”¹ The battle was lost, and the princes were captured. The Song is about the wages of arrogance, disobedience, and rashness, for individuals and for Russia as a whole. It is also about the contrast between the enclosed, ordered places represented by walled towns, and the boundless, featureless, and therefore dangerous world of the open steppes. Eventually Igor returns from captivity to his town, which is welcoming, nurturing, and safe.

Subsequently, the ideal enclosure took many forms—the monastery, the church, the garden, the country manor, the city, the modern state. Many found parallels in Western Europe, while manifesting peculiarly Russian characteristics. Ultimately the most Russian of these characteristics may be less a particular mode of embodiment than the persistence and intensity of the need for enclosure. This need has taken on the quality of myth. It resembles what Mary Douglas, in a very different context, calls a “bounded system,” with “external boundaries, margins, internal structure”; it can form “a complex set of Chinese boxes, each sub-system having little sub-systems of its own.”² Beyond enclosure lies the realm of non-place, which is variously represented as amorphous, unclean, chaotic, indifferent, and hostile, and is to be kept at bay by physical boundaries and by elaborate routines, rituals, and taboos. Although it has often assumed harsh and oppressive form, the ideal of an ordered enclosure in a disordered world remains intact to this day. A cartoon in a recent issue of Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya gazeta, No. 43, Oct. 30, 1991, p. 16), published when the Soviet system was already disintegrating, shows Gorbachev seated at a table facing a group of top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalists, obviously representing the Group of Seven, which he was unsuccessfully trying to join. Issuing from his mouth is a balloon that contains only the lines from the Primary Chronicle we quoted earlier. There are no quotation marks and no attribution. None are necessary, for every Russian knows these words by heart.

The myth of enclosure has proved endlessly nourishing to writers, whose explorations in turn have rooted it still deeper. None was more sensitive to it than Gogol. A “bounded system” underlies his conception of the world in all his writings, fictional and nonfictional. In fact, he mediated it in ways that have proved decisive for many of the great writers who followed him, whether Goncharov in Oblomov (1859), Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment (1866), Bely in Petersburg (1916), or Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward (1968), all of which are built on elaborate interplays of enclosures—social, individual, spiritual, intellectual, and moral.

It is especially in the works of the first period, 1831 through 1836, that Gogol was intent on working out a poetics of bounded space. We can see it at its starkest in “A Terrible Vengeance.”

“A TERRIBLE VENGEANCE”

This story forms part of the second volume of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1832). A brief summary will help orient us. A Cossack wedding feast is under way in a section of Kiev. Among the guests are three of the characters on whom the story eventually centers, Danilo Burulbash; his wife, Katerina; and their infant son. As the host, a Captain of Cossacks, raises the icons to bless the newlyweds, one of the guests turns into a sorcerer, causing fear and confusion, after which the feast winds down to a drunken and silent end. Danilo and his family make their way home by boat on the Dnieper, talking about Katerina’s father, a gloomy and unfriendly man who has returned to live with them after 21 years abroad. He disapproves of Danilo; the two come to blows; only Katerina’s pleas induce her husband to back off and apologize, which he does with heavy heart. At night he goes to a sinister castle nearby, and watches as his father-in-law turns into the sorcerer and calls up Katerina’s soul. Later he locks the sorcerer/father in a cellar, but the compassionate Katerina releases him, whereupon the old man flees to the Poles, who are planning to attack the Cossacks. Tragedies ensue: Danilo is killed by his father-in-law, as is the child; Katerina loses her mind and is eventually murdered by her father, who comes disguised as a friend of Danilo’s. The sorcerer/father, tormented by his crimes, kills a holy hermit who refuses to pray for the salvation of his soul, then flees to the highest mountain of the Carpathians. Here he meets an awesome figure on horseback, who strangles him and drops him into an abyss, where he is gnawed for all eternity by other corpses. In the final chapter, a blind bandore-player explains all these events as the fulfillment of a curse that avenges a much earlier crime of fratricide, whereby the last descendant of the murderer—the sorcerer/father—shall be “the worst criminal that has ever been seen,” and must suffer accordingly.

This account may suggest why “A Terrible Vengeance” is one of the least studied works in the Gogol canon.³ It does not engage everyday reality, but verges on exemplum; it sustains a hieratic tone until the final chapter; it is devoid of humor; the tonality is dark throughout; the characters are scarcely more than cartoons. But a mere summary conveys nothing of the unexpected power, even poignancy, of this apparently simple story, of the ingenious ways in which Gogol turns the myth to his own purposes. And it was probably this work, more than any other by Gogol, that made the myth usable for his successors, as a careful study of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Bunin, and others would show.

As is often the case in Gogol, the opening scene (comprising the first chapter or section) establishes the main theme and direction of the story as a whole. The wedding party is represented as a social collective, whose unity is conveyed stylistically in the first line: Shumit, gremit konets Kieva (“There was a bustle and an uproar in a quarter of Kiev”). This contains two assonances (-mit, -mit) and two alliterations (k-, k-), and scans as three iambs and a dactyl: Shu-mít/gre-mít/ko-néts/Kí-e-va. In fact, rhythmic prose predominates throughout the story. Drawing heavily as it does on the oral traditions of folk literature and formal rhetoric, it further suggests that the telling is ritualized. Ritual is explicit here too: in the wedding itself, the feast that follows, and especially the blessing of the couple with icons. Religious ritual in particular has a way of setting a collective apart and endowing it with a sense of what Mary Douglas calls “wholeness and completeness.” ⁴ Apartness is further marked by another stylistic device common in folklore and rhetoric: a series of negations that define non-place and thereby confirm the identity of true place. They apply first to Katerina’s father: “[the guests] marveled still more that her old father had not come with her. . . . No doubt he would have many strange stories to tell. How could he not have them, after being so long in foreign parts! Everything there is not the same: the people are not the same, and there are no Christian churches. . . . But he had not come.” The next clustering of negatives occurs in the second paragraph: “[The icons] had no rich setting, there was no gleam of either [lit., neither gold or [lit., nor] silver on them.” The icons are “good” because they are not adorned with the traditionally suspect metals, and they are capable of reinforcing the boundary between place and non-place: “no unclean power dares [lit., does not dare] approach [nikakaya nechistaya sila ne posmeet]” (I, 136). ⁵

Another negative attaches to a Cossack “standing in their midst” whom “nobody knew” (lit., nobody did not know: nikto ne znal). What is alien is now present; a boundary has been crossed. Moreover, the icons have the power to define the distinction for all to see. The moment the host raises them in blessing, this Cossack’s face undergoes a complete transformation: “his nose grew longer and twisted to one side, his rolling eyes turned from brown to green, his lips turned blue, his chin quivered and grew pointed like a spear, a tusk peeped out of his mouth, a hump appeared behind his head, and the Cossack turned into an old man” (136—37). Transformation works in two ways here, either pulling things out of their proper place or substituting one thing for another. In either case it violates boundaries and threatens the collective. The point is reinforced by the sudden lapse into ordinary Russian, which contrasts with the prevailing high style. Particularly disturbing is the sorcerer’s ability to move in and out of the guise of a Cossack. A “real” Cossack is nothing but Cossack; he is bounded by the set of gestures, thoughts, and actions that have been assigned him from birth by the collective. The only kind of acceptable “change” might be a spiritual one, which would involve no physical dislocations or transmutations, although this does not figure in “A Terrible Vengeance” or for that matter in Gogol’s work through most of the 1830’s. Here, on the contrary, change is accompanied by fragmentation as body parts are enumerated and compared to nonhuman orders (lance, tusk). Fragmentation is an attribute of death, so it is not surprising that an “old man” is the result.

The collective fears and tries to protect itself against the kind of change represented by the sorcerer. As its spokesman, the captain “stepped forward and, turning the icons toward him, said in a loud voice: ‘Away, image of Satan! This is no place for you!”’ (137). One of the epithets traditionally attached to Satan is “unclean power” (it is actually mentioned earlier in the scene). We are mindful of what Douglas calls “the old definition of dirt as matter out of place” (35). What is dirty or unclean, that is, out of place, must be swept away, sent back, as it were, to its own place, which in effect is “not here.” The young people ask the question: “What sort of sorcerer is this? [Chto eto za koldun?]” This suggests that there is something mysterious not so much about sorcerers in general as about this particular one. Victor Turner has called attention to “a widely prevalent social tendency either to make what falls outside the norm a matter of concern for the widest recognized group,” often by sacralizing it, “or to destroy the exceptional phenomenon.”⁶ Russian folk belief recognizes the so-called “wedding sorcerer,” who is invited to the feast and given the place of honor lest he spoil the ceremonies and bring harm to the young couple and the guests. But Gogol’s sorcerer is not of this kind. The power of ritual at first seems capable of mustering the collective’s defenses against the intrusion. Another stylistic shift, however, intimates that something is amiss. Dialogue appears for the first time, and in a colloquial Russian: “‘It’s him! It’s him!,’ shouted the crowd [krichali]. . . . ‘The sorcerer has appeared again!’ cried [krichali] the mothers.”⁷ A cry or shout also marks a violent intrusion into the harmony of ceremony and music. These sounds are further associated with suddenness and with change, which offend the bounded order: “all at once [vdrug] the children playing on the ground cried out [zakrichali] in terror” as they saw how “at once [vdrug] the Cossack’s face completely changed.” All three images—change, unpleasant sound, and suddenness—are caught up in the final aspect of the sorcerer: “hissing and clacking his teeth like a wolf, the strange old man vanished.” He is no longer present, but he is not entirely absent either. One sign is that diversity now prevails, first as “talk and conjecture,” tolki i rechi, both plural nouns in Russian, then as discrete groups of people, each of which has its own version of the sorcerer’s identity: “almost everyone told [the story] differently.” A final flourish of negations hints that the boundary between place and non-place is no longer so firm: “no one could tell anything [lit., ‘could not tell’] certain about him” (137).

The festive atmosphere of the story’s beginning seems restored as activities resume: “A barrel of mead was rolled out and many gallons of Greek wine were brought into the yard. The guests regained their light-heartedness. The orchestra struck up—the girls, the young women, the gallant Cossacks in their gay-colored coats flew around in the dance.” But this is immediately followed by a hint that returns of any kind are no longer possible: “After a glass, old folks [star’e] of ninety, of a hundred, began dancing too,” in a kind of Totentanz. With these ancient folk comes a dimension of time, hitherto absent, as they remember “the years that had passed.” Boundaries are crossed laterally by the dispersal of most of the guests, and the remaining space is fragmented as the Cossacks “[drop] to sleep uninvited under the benches, on the floor, by their horses, by the stables” (137). But there is no corresponding individualization of characters. On the contrary, the personages in this final scene are designated by collective adverbs and by nouns that are singular in number and mostly neuter in gender: “The guests began to disperse, but only a paucity [malo] made its way home; a multitude [mnogo] stayed to spend the night . . . ; and even more Cossackry [kazachestvo] dropped to sleep. . . wherever the Cossack head [kozatskaya golova] stumbled, there it [subject unexpressed in Russian] lay,” and so on. My literal translation is awkward, but it is meant to show how Gogol makes the point that until now, people have been marked by name, rank, age, social position, and, where appropriate, by plurals. The effect has been to suggest that it is only in and through the collective that people attain individuality. Conversely and ironically, the destruction of the collective means the destruction of individuality and the imminence of death, as the first of the series of collective nouns, star’e, “old folkery,” neatly hints. The point is restated in the concluding phrase: lezhít i khrapít na ves’ Kíev (“lay and snored for all of Kiev to hear”). This parallels the opening Shumít [i] gremít konéts Kíeva; but instead of dancing, immobility and sleep prevail, to the accompaniment of the “music” of snoring.

“All of Kiev” marks a considerable expansion of the “quarter of Kiev” in which the story begins. Foreshadowed is the steady enlargement of boundaries throughout, from Kiev to the Cossack Ukraine, then to the Carpathian Mountains, and finally to the universe. With every swing of the narration back to Kiev, the original place becomes distended. By chapter 14, the Carpathians are visible from it, as they literally are not; and when we reach the final chapter, this place is gone, has disappeared altogether, like a huge bubble that has swelled and burst. Instead, we find ourselves in the otherwise insignificant town of Glukhov, where a blind bard explains the meaning of the story to a group of awed listeners.⁸ Read this way, the story describes a movement from a small, well-enclosed place to any place, or no place at all. This is the general direction followed by most of Gogol’s fictions.

Expansion is caused by the intrusion of an alien element into a social body that is already full and integral. Again this holds in a general way throughout Gogol’s work. In “A Terrible Vengeance,” the element takes three different forms. One comes from the outside, most graphically as the sorcerer. Another consists of people who leave the...