Текст книги "The Collected tales of Nikolai Gogol"

Автор книги: Николай Гоголь

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THE

RICHARD PEVEAR

LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

PREFACE

TRANSLATORS' NOTE

Chancellor

II

III

VI

VII

IX

XI

XIII

I

II

III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

PETERSBURG TALES

II

III

PART II

NOTES

3. See note 7 to "Old World Landowners."

PETERSBURG TALES

1. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."

3. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."

1. See note 20 to "The Portrait."

THE

COLLECTED

TALES OF

NIKOLAI GOGOL

Translated and Annotated by

RICHARD PEVEAR

and

LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

St. John's Eve 3

The Night Before Christmas 19

The Terrible Vengeance 64

Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt 106

Old World Landowners 132

Viy 155

The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich 194

Nevsky Prospect 245

The Diary of a Madman 279

The Nose 300

The Carriage 327

The Portrait 340

The Overcoat 394

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 play– wright), 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 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 quali– ties 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

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 insist that he is faithfully repeating what he heard from earlier storytellers; otherwise it would be something made up, a fiction, a he. 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 antitra-ditional. "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 contendess 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 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 Sinyav-sky 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. Major Kovalev, hero of "The Nose," is a "collegiate assessor made in the Caucasus," meaning made rather quickly. He was "made" rather recently, as well, and is still quite proud of his advancement. One day his nose disappears and then turns up "by himself" in the street wearing the uniform of a state councillor, a civil-service rank roughly equivalent to the military rank of general. Major Kovalev is not even sure of the proper way to address him. The fiction of ranks is also at the center of "The Diary of a Madman." Here, for instance, the awarding of a decoration is described from the family dog's point of view. The dog notices that her usually taciturn master has begun talking to himself, saying, "Will I get it or won't I?" over and over again. A week later he comes home very happy:

All morning gentlemen in uniforms kept coming to him, congratulating him for something. At the table he was merrier than I'd ever seen him before, told jokes, and after dinner he held me up to his neck and said: "Look, Medji, what's this?" I saw some little ribbon. I sniffed it but found decidedly no aroma; finally I licked it on the sly: it was a bit salty.

The keeper of the "Diary," Mr. Poprishchin, also broods on the question of rank, because he is unhappily in love with his chief's daughter, who is in love with a handsome kammerjunker:

Several times already I've tried to figure out where all these differences come from. What makes me a titular councillor and why on earth am I a titular councillor? Maybe I'm some sort of count or general and only seem to be a titular councillor? Maybe I myself don't know who I am… can't I be promoted this minute to governor general, or intendant, or something else like that? I'd like to know, what makes me a titular councillor? Why precisely a titular councillor?

In the end he decides he is the king of Spain, an act of perfect fic-tionizing for which he is taken off to the madhouse.

"The Diary of a Madman" is Gogol's only first-person story, and Mr. Poprishchin is perhaps the most human of his characters. For brief moments a piercing note comes into his voice, as when he asks, "Why precisely a titular councillor?" or when he calls out his last words to his mother: "Dear mother, save your poor son! shed a tear on his sick head! see how they torment him! press the poor orphan to your breast! there's no place for him in the world!" We hear the same note, more briefly still, in the voice of that other titular councillor, Akaky Akakievich, when his fellow clerks torment him unbearably and he finally says: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?" There is something so strange, so pitiable in his voice that one young clerk never forgets it:

And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?"-and in these penetrating words rang other words: "I am your brother." And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands…

These moments of pathos led certain radical critics of Gogol's time, the influential Vissarion Belinsky first among them, to see Gogol as a champion of the little man and an enemy of the existing social order. The same view later became obligatory for Soviet critics. But whatever semblance of social criticism or satire there may be in the Petersburg tales is secondary and incidental. The pathos is momentary, and Gogol packs his clerks off to the madhouse or out of this world with a remarkably cool hand.

The young Dostoevsky, in his first novel, Poor Folk, challenged Gogol's unfeeling treatment of his petty clerk. Dostoevsky's hero, Makar Devushkin, is also a titular councillor and clearly modeled on Akaky Akakievich. He lives by the same endless copying work and suffers the same humiliating treatment from his fellow clerks. But instead of being an automaton whose highest ideals are embodied in a new overcoat, Makar Devushkin is endowed with inner life, personal dignity, and the ability to love. He is also a writer of sorts, concerned with developing his own style. And he is a literary critic. Makar Devushkin reads Gogol's "The Overcoat" and is offended: "And why write such things? And why is it necessary?… Well, it's a nasty little book… It's simply unheard of, because it's not even possible that there could be such a civil servant. No, I will make a complaint… I will make a formal complaint." Makar Devushkin shows the influence of sentimental French social novels on Russian literature of the 1840s. Nothing could be further from the spirit of such writing than Gogol's strange humor. The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message. He saw the fiction of ranks not as an evil to be exposed but as an instance of the groundlessness of reality itself and of the incanta-tory power of words.

Gogol labored more over "The Portrait" than over any of his other tales. The expanded second version was published seven years after the first, in the Collected Works of 1842. Belinsky considered it a total failure and thought he knew how it should have been written. He would have purified Gogol's "realism" of what he considered its alien admixture of the fantastic, "a childish fantas-magoria that could fascinate or frighten people only in the ignorant Middle Ages, but for us is neither amusing nor frightening, but simply ridiculous and boring." He goes on to explain:

No, such a realization of the story would do no particular credit to the most insignificant talent. But the thought of the story would be excellent if the poet had understood it in a contemporary spirit: in Chartkov he wanted to portray a gifted artist who ruined his talent, and consequently himself, through greed for money and the fascination of petty fame. And the realization of this thought should have been simple, without fantastic whimsies, grounded in everyday reality: then Gogol, given his talent, would have created something great.

Belinsky's suggestion amounts to the negation of the artist Gogol and his replacement by a "critical realist" of the dullest sort, a useful chicken instead of a bird of paradise. The contemporary spirit that Belinsky called for was of no interest at all to the author of "The Portrait." (A century later, in his little book on Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, though no disciple of Belinsky, offered a similarly rationalizing reduction of Gogol's work, rejecting all the fantastic tales as juvenilia and allowing as the real Gogol only "The Overcoat," The Inspector General, and the first part of Dead Souls. His criterion was not social utility, however, but artistic idiosyncrasy, an appeal to "that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.") Gogol had a different understanding of the artist's task and of his temptation. The fantastic and the diabolical were always essential dimensions of his world, never more so than in "The Portrait."

He toiled over "The Portrait" because it involved a judgment of his own work and its central question tormented him personally. It was not a question of the harmful influence of money or fame, but something more primitive and essential: the ambiguous power of the artistic image itself. And the more lifelike the image, the more perplexing the question. The ambition to achieve a perfect likeness might go beyond the artist's control and bring into the world something he never intended. Thus the portrait in Gogol's tale looks back at its viewers, looks back with the eyes of the Antichrist whose life it has magically prolonged. The corrupting power of the gold it bestows on its new purchaser, the painter Chartkov, is only a secondary effect, an extension of the evil present in the painted image itself. The question the tale explores is whether art is sacramental or sacrilegious, godlike or diabolical, and at what point it may change from one to the other. Some years later, in 1847, Gogol wrote a letter to his father confessor in which he declared himself "guilty and cursed" not only for having portrayed the devil, which he had done with the intention of mocking him, and not only for having painted nothing but grotesque images, being unable to describe a positive character properly, but first of all for having attemped to re-create each thing "as alive as a painter from life." In "The Portrait," the terms of this self-condemnation were already embodied dramatically.

Nature is always doubled by the supernatural in Gogol's tales, and the ordinary is always open to the assaults of the extraordinary. The reality of the capital is a closed fiction, an unrelieved banality, but filled with gigantic, unexpected forces, like the huge fist "the size of a clerk s head" that suddenly comes at Akaky Akakievich out of the darkness. If Akaky Akakievich transgressed the order of things by desiring a new overcoat (by desiring anything at all), and is punished most terribly for it in the phantasmal world of Petersburg, he also returns as a phantom himself and has his revenge. He momentarily becomes one of those unexpected forces, robs the important person of his overcoat, frightens a policeman away with "such a fist… as is not to be found even among the living," and, having grown much taller, vanishes completely into the darkness of night.

Gogol was made uneasy by his works. They detached themselves from him and lived on their own, producing effects he had not foreseen and that sometimes dismayed him. He would write commentaries after the fact, trying to reduce them to more commonplace and acceptable dimensions. But their initial freedom stayed with them. It was inherent in his method of composition, and in his astonishing artistic gift-astonishing first of all to himself.