The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Public honor pursued through the dueling code requires that parties take themselves with high seriousness, stay put, and fire according to the rules. Having done so, a person “saves face.” Further explanations or public confessions are inappropriate. Gogol prefers to work in more evasive, private realms. His heroes do not stay put. They move through spaces, quickly and linearly. They don’t come home – or they don’t have identifiable homes, a possibility that is concretely realized by Dostoevsky when he houses his heroes in crowded apartments that are in effect corridors, breeding places for “accidental families.” (Tolstoy once remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters all behave as if they lived at a train station.) When Gogol’s heroes slow down, then the trouble starts, and to save themselves they must burst out. A happy ending, for Gogol, is an escape. If Pushkin is Russia’s poet of honor, then Gogol is the unmatched master of evasion and embarrassment.

Gogol and embarrassment (its linearity, lopsidedness, evasiveness)

By temperament and upbringing, Pushkin was an aristocrat, thoroughly at home in European culture. Rank, honor, and pedigree were for him second nature. Nikolai Gogol, in contrast, was a provincial, the son of a minor landowner raisedin Ukraine. Hisgraduation certificatefrompublic school conferred upon him the lowest rank, ‘collegiate registrar’ (civilian rank Fourteen). When Gogol moved to Petersburg at age nineteen, nothing in the imperial capital’s estranged, glittering, regimented social system could have struck him as natural or organic. For Gogol – a brilliant stylizer of Ukrainian folk tales, which he filled with demons, witches, and gothic villains – Petersburg proved to be marvelous creative material. His stories quickly became foundational for the Petersburg Myth.

Before entering that urban landscape, however, with its caricatures in uniform and detachable human parts, we will consider one “provincial” anecdote (Gogol’s shortest story, as it happens), which he intended for an almanac edited by Pushkin in 1835. It introduces in miniature the dynamics of a Gogolian narrative, psychological as well as spatial. This little stretch of text contains no

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fantastic or grotesque episodes of the sort we see in the Ukrainian folk tales or Petersburg stories. It passed unnoticed in the press. But Tolstoy later remarked that he was tempted to call it Gogol’s best work, and Chekhov felt that these few pages were worth 200,000 rubles, so perfectly did they concentrate Gogol’s genius. The anecdote is “The Carriage.”

A cavalry regiment enters a provincial town, largely mud and pigs. The storyteller describes the town with hyperbolic relish. Gogolian digressions, it must be said, are not elegant or elegiac, as in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; they are stuffed full of food (gorged or swilled), crude squawking sounds, the misbehavior of physical matter. A favored device of the storyteller is to fasten his eccentric roving eye on one inanimate thing (in this story, carriages) or one body part (bellies, moustaches) and stealthily, this one item becomes all on the horizon the reader sees. The general gives a banquet. Over cigars a local landowner, Chertokutsky, offers to sell his Excellency a carriage. The landowner invites the general and his officers to lunch the next day for a viewing. But then Chertokutsky stays on at the banquet, begins to play whist, “a mysterious glass full of rum punch appears before him,” he plays and drinks, drinks and plays, “recalls winning a great deal, yet there appeared to be no winnings for him to pick up . . .”.19 At 3 a.m. he stumbles home. His pretty wife doesn’t wake him in the morning, and only at noon does she hear the rumbling coaches of the general and his suite. Chertokutsky, in a panic, gives orders to say that he’s gone for the day and hides out in his carriage. The general and his men arrive. Irritated at this defaulted invitation, the general decides to take a look at the item on his way out. Nothing special about it, he says. But maybe on the inside? His officer unfastens the coverlet:

and there was Chertokutsky, hunched in a preposterous position and wrapped in his dressing-gown. “Ah, here you are!” said the general in surprise. And with that he slammed the door shut, pulled the apron back over Chertokutsky and drove off, with the gentlemen officers.

(p. 157)