The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In contrast to Pushkin, both of Gogol’s pretenders – or better, imposters – are fictional creations with wholly civilian concerns. Khlestakov from The Government Inspector (1836) is a Petersburg fop who, passing through a provincial town, is mistaken for a police investigator by the gullible, corrupt local bureaucracy. Chichikov from Dead Souls (1842) is a trickster in the mode of traveling salesman – or better, buyer-up of deceased serfs. These two imposters are fictional in a deeper sense than the fact that Gogol made them up. They also make themselves up as they go along, as do all rogues, feeding

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off the foolishness or venality of the terrain. In Gogol’s messianic vision, such inconstancy of personality was not creative or playful but unclean, demonic. Pushkin’s historical pretenders, Grishka Otrepiev from 1604 and Pugachov from the 1770s, were in their time also perceived as “demonic,” branded villains and Antichrists. Let us first consider the two plays.

Gogol’s provincial town is taken up by identity crises of a comic and disreputable sort. The Mayor’s primary anxiety is to determine whether this “inspector” is as corrupt as himself and therefore can be bribed into silence about the town’s petty vice. In Gogol, extended contact between characters makes them (and us) increasingly nervous; people corrode one another as communication proceeds. Pushkin, in contrast, presents his pretenders as positive, even honorable personalities, men in whom value is allowed to accrete. They might be pretending, but the more time we spend with them, the truer and fuller they become. Let us begin at the point in these two plays when the freshly arrived “pretender” is receiving petitions. In Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, this is the first Polish scene. The Pretender meets a Catholic priest (to whom he promises the conversion of the Russian people to the Roman faith), then a Polish noble, a Russian defector, a rebel Cossack leader, and finally a poet whom he rewards for Latin verses. Dmitry has the same golden effect on all. He listens to each petitioner and to each promises exactly what is required to gain their respect and support. He literally creates himself in their image of him, before our eyes. This buoyantly “attractive adventurer,” as Pushkin called his Pretender, has been variously explained as the responsive spirit of poetic improvisation (a skill Pushkin greatly admired) or as a documented historical figure, Russia’s first genuinely clement prince and the original embodiment of the utopian myth of a resurrected returning tsarevich.23 Either way, Pushkin’s False Dmitry does not strike us as a fraud. Historically, of course, Russian regal pretenders were all “exposed” (the False Dmitry reigned for a year and was assassinated; Pugachov was caught and beheaded). But within art, Pushkin deals very generously with their risk-taking and openness to fate, granting it full legitimacy. Pretenders took on other people’s hopes and allowed them, for a time, to flourish. For Pushkin, samozvantstvo, “claiming for yourself a name not your own,” was “not theft, embezzlement, expropriation, but exchange.”24 Since pretenders don’t come with ready-made property, everything depends on inspiring trust and circulating it.

The opposite dynamic operatesinGogol. InTheGovernmentInspector,open-ness to an identity that is not one’s own has a bawdy, greedy, demonic quality to it. When a body is open, Russian folk wisdom teaches, mischief will crawl into it and everything begins to slip. Khlestakov – before he realizes that his mistaken identity can be turned to his advantage – is as frightened of going to jail as are

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the town officials, although for different reasons. The proper response of an audience to this devolving fiasco would be horror, released through a guffaw. Gogol was appalled at the stiffness of the 1836 premiere and insisted that the one positive character in the play had been overlooked: Laughter.