Career of Improvement
Gogol's "The Nose" is a beautiful example of what Homi Bhabha calls the "colonial doubling," which summarizes the processes of loss, splitting, and reconfiguration that are essential for the colonial situation. We can lose a part in many interesting ways, from castration, or decolonization, or even from shaving, or some combination of these. Presenting a faceless colonial administrator, Gogol analyzes his nose as an imperial fetish, a "metonymy of presence" where presence is unreachable and its signs, unrecognizable. Indeed, for Kovalev, there was no presence without his nose. Without the part, everything that the whole required - office, power, women - became unreachable. When in its proper place, the nose is just a little part of Kovalev's wholeness, a metonymy of his impeccable functioning as the corporeal and imperial subject. Lost, the nose turns into the all- embracing symbol for Kovalev's unaccomplished dreams and aspirations, the summary metaphor for all those goods, bodies, and statuses - vice-governorship, fortunate bride, social pleasures - which are unreachable for the noseless. The part is made into a fetish only after it has been lost. The Hegelian relations of master and slave are analogous to Gogolian relations of the whole and the part. As long as the part is the slave of the whole, the order is safe; but the rebellion of the part has more dramatic effects than the rebellion of the slave, because it questions the deepest, the most naturalized perceptions of the social order. Colonial differences cross-penetrate all social bodies, including the body of Kovalev. Together, Kovalev and his separatist nose make a wonderful illustration for the enigmatic, Gogolian formula that Bhabha repeats without explaining: "less than one and double" (Bhabha 1994: 130, 166).
An imperial author with an exemplary biography, Gogol was born in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg where he failed first as an official and then as a historian, succeeded as a writer, and failed again as a political thinker. He belongs to the list of great colonial authors, along with James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. The plot of Dead Souls was an imperial project; with his Napoleonic look, the protagonist Chichikov plans to resettle the purchased peasants to a recently colonized land near Kherson in the southern steppe and to mortgage them to the state. The fact that the peasants were dead makes their transportation easier. Kherson was the land of the notorious Potemkin villages, but the internal provinces that Chichikov visited on his way were no more trustworthy. Dead Souls should be read as the saga of Russia's colonization, a text on a par with the British Robinson Crusoe or the American Moby Dick. When Gogol's Inspector-General went on stage in 1836, hostile critics targeted precisely this colonial aspect of Gogol's inspiration. These horrible events could never have happened in central Russia, only in Ukraine or Belorussia; or even worse, continued a critic, they could have happened "only on the Sandwich Islands that captain Cook visited" (Bulgarin 1836). With and without their lost noses and dead souls, Gogol's characters were precise images "of a post-Enlightenment man tethered to . . . his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, that splits his presence . . . repeats his action at a distance" (Bhabha 1994: 62). The colonial nature of Gogol's inspiration has been emphasized by a more recent wave of scholarship, which was itself inspired by the post-Soviet transformation of Ukraine (Shkandrij 2001; Bojanowska 2007). Understandably, postcolonial scholars have focused on Gogol's Ukrainian roots and stories. The colonial nature of his works on Russia and the Russians, such as "The Nose" and Dead Souls, have eluded them, because such an understanding requires the concept of internal colonization. I believe that postcolonial criticism clarifies Gogol, but the opposite is also true: Gogol helps us to understand Bhabha.
In 1835, when Gogol was teaching Universal History at St. Petersburg Imperial University and Kovalev was starting his service in the Caucasus, Lord Macaulay delivered his Minute on Indian Education. Working for the Viceroy of India, Macaulay argued that only teaching English to the Indian elite would create the "interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern." He referred to Russia as the positive modeclass="underline"
Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades, has gradually emerged from the ignorance. . . . I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions. . . . There is reason to hope that this vast empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. (Macaulay 1862: 109-10)
For Macaulay, the west and the east were but steps on the worldwide ladder of history. Where England was in the tenth century, Russia was in the eighteenth and Punjab in the nineteenth. In this vision, the higher stages smoothly replaced the lower ones in the mother country. In the large space of empire, these different stages of progress all coexisted; moreover, they became known to the politician mainly because of their coexistence in the imperial domain rather than because of their obscure traces in the national archive. In India and Russia, higher races, castes, and estates cohabited with lower ones. The imperial task was to make order out of this chaos, which meant creating categories, managing hierarchies, regulating distances. After Peter the Great, "the languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindu what they have done for the Tartar," said Macaulay.
A few years later, the leading Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote that, without Peter the Great, Russia "would probably still have accepted European civilization but it would have done so in the same way in which India adopted the English one" (1954: 5/142). In other words, Belinsky saw Russia's westernization as a response to the anxiety of being colonized by the west, though of course this anxiety was also a European influence, one of those languages that Russia, like India, imported from the west. As a matter of fact, India was a colony and Russia was an empire, which made Macaulay's comparison a little forced; what is interesting is that he did not notice it. For Belinsky and his readers, Russia's sovereignty - its difference from India - was the crucial fact. The imperial gradient between the higher and lower groups was immense in the British and Russian Empires; in the former the difference was mainly between the mother country and the colony, while in the latter the difference was mainly between groups within the mother country. Although straight in the national domain, the line of progress curved and folded within its imperial possessions. Later, Marxist theorists struggled with the same issue. Lev Trotsky called it "combined and uneven development" (1922, 1959). In his vision, advanced and backward societies coexisted in Russia simultaneously and "traumatically"; their contradictions would "inevitably" result in a revolution (Knei- Paz 1978: 95).
During the High Imperial Period, which lasted from Russia's victory in the Napoleonic War (1814) to its defeat in the Crimean War (1856), the Russian educated class spoke and wrote French as well as Russian. German was a heritage language for many, and English was for the creme de la creme. The famous works of Russian literature depicted this polyglossia and were often inspired by French examples (Meyer 2009). In Aleksandr Pushkin's novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin (1832), Tatiana's letter of love was written in French. Typical for ladies of high society, Tatiana's Russian was worse than her French, explained Pushkin. French was the language of women and family life; Russian was the language of men, of the military service and the household economy where work was carried out by serfs and soldiers. In Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), where the action takes place during the Napoleonic War, the officers and officials who were fighting with the French speak French with their wives and daughters, Russian to their subordinates, and mix the languages when talking to their peers. Unlike Pushkin, who in his novel "translated" Tatiana's letter into Russian verse, Tolstoy wrote these long dialogues in French and published them with no translation, expecting his readers to understand them. But his public was changing rapidly and within a few years he had to translate these French sections into Russian for the next edition of his masterpiece.