The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chichikov merely kept smiling, jouncing a little on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian doesn’t love fast driving? How should his soul, which yearns to go off into a whirl, to go off on a fling, to say on occasion: “Devil take it all!” – how should his soul fail to love it? Is it not a thing to be loved, when one can sense in it something exaltedly wondrous? Some unseen power, it seems, has caught you up on its wing, and you’re flying yourself, and all other things are flying . . .27

The authentic new hero has become movement itself, the boundless Russian space into which Chichikov escapes, bleak, dingy, dispersed – as Nabokov writes, “Russia as Gogol saw Russia” (p. 107). Nabokov then adds that for Gogol, Russia was “a peculiar landscape, a special atmosphere, a symbol, a long, long road.” The bursting-out along this road need not be strictly linear; both geographically and stylistically, it can be a zigzag or a swirl. Digressions, hyperbolic metaphors and brokenidioms can twist in a moment’s time from the grotesque to the pious, fromthe pious to the insane. Whatever principles govern the brilliantly excessive verbiage of Gogol’s prose, they represent the opposite of Pushkin’s, which were, we recall, “precision, brevity, ideas and more ideas.” “The prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional,” Nabokov says crisply; “that of Gogol is four-dimensional, at least” (p. 145).

What can be said in summary of these two very different worlds and legacies, Pushkin’s and Gogol’s? Pushkin certainly knew anguish and the impulse to escape. But part of being an aristocrat meant avoiding plots based on comic “impersonations upward” by people of low rank. His own “poor clerk” Evgeny from The Bronze Horseman is singularly indifferent to his rank and craves a modest life, even though he is of noble ancestry. Pushkin bestows honor and self-respect everywhere, on all deserving parties, on runaway monks and renegade Cossacks. When he does play with rank, he prefers the aristocratic and Shakespearean device of “impersonation downward” – such as in the final Belkin Tale, “Lady into Peasant,” where a gentry maiden dresses up (or better, down) as a peasant girl in order to catch the attention (and then love) of her otherwise inaccessible gentry bridegroom. After Onegin turns down her proposal of love, Tatyana Larina is willing to become a princess but in no way prefers that status to her earlier, simpler rural life.

Gogol does not do genteel pastoral masquerades of this sort. His material is more voluble, patchy, and vulnerable. It takes the form of the miserable private madness of poor Poprishchin in Diary of a Madman – who looks around, sees a vacancy, and chooses to be the King of Spain – or the pretenses of a Chichikov and Khlestakov, who also “pretend upward” but so flamboyantly and publicly that eventually they are driven out of town, or fly out of it. The pastoral is also

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of little use to Dostoevsky, except as a ‘Golden Age’ recalled in childhood or projected into a utopian dream. The first realm of Gogol’s that Dostoevsky will appropriate is the painful, embarrassed world of the ambitious poor clerk who insists that he cannot be the person he knows he really is – but unlike Gogol’s timid little men, these characters will find some other person, or some theory, to blame for it.

In fact, so brilliantly did Dostoevsky apply his new devices of psychological prose to Gogol’s flattened world that Gogol himself was somewhat eclipsed.28 In part this was due to Gogol’s confusing ideological profile: his final published book, Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends (1847) was a humorless and politically reactionary treatise, poorly received by the critics. In part the eclipse was due to tsarist copyright, which, after Gogol’s death in 1852, reverted for fifty years to his mother and four sisters. They were inexperienced in publishing and failed to promote or distribute new editions of his work. This matter was rectified only with the centennial of Gogol’s birth in 1909, and in the 1920–30s Gogol at last began to receive successors worthy of him.