The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

For the two novels, The Captain’s Daughter and Dead Souls, our point of departure is precisely this question of running away. Taking on an identity, for Pushkin, entailed responsibility, because his plots tend to circle around and come home. Pushkin’s heroes might perform poetic improvisations, but they do not burst out to safety beyond the frame of the story, which is Gogol’s favored route. In Pushkin, getting away with pretense does create weight, and this qualifies the pretender, during his brief sojourn on stage or in history, to be taken seriously, treated eye to eye as an equal, as someone who understands honor and deserves it. In one of his face-to-face encounters with Grinyov, Pugachov explains the morality he lives by in terms of an ancient Kalmyk tale. It is better, the pretender says, to live thirty-three years on fresh blood like the eagle than three hundred years on carrion like the raven. To which Grinyov responds: “Clever. But in my opinion, to live by murder and plunder is the same as pecking carrion.” Both men fall silent. Not only does each live by his own truth, which is beyond the other’s judgment, but only by speaking one’s truth can a life be saved – one’s own, or another’s.

In Chapter 8,Pugachovdemandsthat GrinyovrecognizehimasTsar PeterIII. “Judge for yourself,” Grinyov responds. “You’re a sharp-witted person: you’d be the first to realize that I was faking . . . I swore allegiance to her Majesty the Empress; I cannot serve you.”26 Pugachov is impressed by this sincerity (by this willingness to ignore hierarchy and address him eye to eye) and sets Grinyov free. A similar exchange occurs in Chapter 12. Pugachov has just liberated Masha Mironova from the clutches of the villain and traitor Shvabrin.

122 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The humiliated Shvabrin reveals that Masha is not the priest’s niece, as had been claimed, but the Captain’s daughter. Pugachov turns angrily to Grinyov, who again decides to tell the truth. “Judge for yourself. Could I have declared in front of your men that Mironov’s daughter was alive? They would have torn her to pieces” (p. 340). Pugachov bursts into laughter, agrees, and sets both Grinyov and his sweetheart free. These conversations resemble displays of honor between equals, between two enlightened noblemen – not an exchange between a young high-born officer and an illiterate Cossack rebel. To be sure equality does not mean endorsement. At no point, note, does Grinyov approve of Pugachov, his rebellion, or his wanton violence. But close up they speak the same language. They have nothing to conceal and can easily default to a language of trust. Such clarity and truth-telling will be interpreted, on the institutional level, as treason.

What, finally, about the pretender Chichikov in Dead Souls? Why must he run away? Chichikov’s project is a bureaucratic ruse spread out along a road. Everything works as long as the hero keeps moving. In the first half of the novel – a series of one-on-one interviews with serfowners, distributed along this road – our rogue buys up legally alive but actually dead serfs so he can mortgage them for cash. Not only do the caricatured interviewees flesh out a number of venal sins (the sins that land us in purgatory: sloth, foolishness, wrath, gluttony, miserliness), but each has a natural home in past Russian literary genres or heroes, here exaggerated and parodied. We meet a Karamzin-style Sentimentalist (Manilov), a comic Baba Yaga of the folk tale who, disappointed in her guest, will be the immediate cause of his downfall (Korobochka), an over-the-top Romantic gambler, bully, and teller of tall tales (Nozdryov). As Chichikov interviews each of them for his project, he holds up a mirror – making sure that his own face is nowhere reflected. The final portrait, of the miser Plyushkin and his neglected polluted estate, presents us with a sort of black hole, where goods move directly from the storehouse to the dump, where greed rots everything and returns it to a state of nature.

After the ruin of Plyushkin,the roadstops. Chichikov lingersintown, nursing a slight cold, and now that he has stopped traveling, words about him begin to gather and stick. Ominous rumors circulate about his identity: is he a ravisher of maidens, perhaps Napoleon in disguise, perhaps even the Antichrist? By the time he bursts out of the story, Chichikov has become so encrusted with ludicrous pseudo-identities that his actual biography – if we believe the form in which Gogol provides it in the final chapter – is somehow dissatisfying, intolerably drab.

The moment of Chichikov’s escape takes place in some indescribable realm. Deflated, disgraced, he is in his carriage heading out of town. Suddenly the carriage becomes a troika, flying up and down hillocks:

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