It would be of course ridiculous to suppose that Gogol spent ten years merely in trying to write something that would please the Church. What he was really trying to do was to write something that would please both Gogol the artist and Gogol the monk. He was obsessed by the thought that great Italian painters had done this again and again: a cool cloister, roses climbing a wall, a gaunt man wearing a skull-cap, the radiant fresh colors of the fresco he is working upon—these formed the professional setting which Gogol craved. Transmuted into literature, the completed Dead Souls was to form three connected images: Crime, Punishment, and Redemption. The attainment of this object was absolutely impossible not only because Gogol's unique genius was sure to play havoc with any conventional scheme if given a free hand, but because he had forced the main role, that of the sinner, upon a person—if Chichikov can be called a person—who was most ridiculously unfit for that part and who moreover moved in a world where such things as saving one's soul simply did not happen. A sympathetically pictured priest in the midst of the Gogolian characters of the first volume would have been as utterly impossible as a gauloiserie in Pascal or a quotation from Thoreau in Stalin's latest speech.
In the few chapters of the second part that have been preserved, Gogol's magic glasses become blurred. Chichikov though remaining (with a vengeance) in the center of the field somehow departs from the focal plane. There are several splendid passages in these chapters, but they are mere echoes of the first part. And when the "good" characters appear—the thrifty landowner, the saintly merchant, the God-like Prince, one has the impression of perfect strangers crowding in to take possession of a draughty house where familiar things stand in dismal disorder. As I have already mentioned, Chichikov's swindles are but the phantoms and parodies of crime, so that no "real" retribution is possible without a distortion of the whole idea. The "good people" are false because they do not belong to Gogol's world and thus every contact between them and Chichikov is jarring and depressing. If Gogol did write the redemption part with a "good priest" (of a slightly Catholic type) saving Chichikov's soul in the depths of Siberia (there exist some scraps of information that Gogol studied Pallas'
Siberian Flora in order to get the right background), and if Chichikov was fated to end his days as an emaciated monk in a remote monastery, then no wonder that the artist, in a last blinding flash of artistic truth, burnt the end of Dead Souls.
Father Matthew could be satisfied that Gogol shortly before dying had renounced literature; but the brief blaze that might be deemed a proof and symbol of this renunciation happened to be exactly the opposite thing: as he crouched and sobbed in front of that stove ("Where?" queries my publisher. In Moscow.), an artist was destroying the labor of long years because he finally realized that the completed book was untrue to his genius; so Chichikov, instead of piously petering out in a wooden chapel among ascetic fir trees on the shore of a legendary lake, was restored to his native element; the little blue flames of a humble hell.
40
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
". . .a certain man who was, I daresay, not very remarkable: short he was and somewhat poxmarked and somewhat on the carroty side, and somewhat even blear-eyed and a little bald in front, with symmetrically wrinkled cheeks and the kind of complexion termed hemorrhoidal . . .
"... His name was Bashmachkin. Already the name itself clearly shows that it had formerly come from basbmak —a shoe.
But when, and at what time it had come from "shoe," this is totally unknown. All of them—the father and the grandfather, and even the brother-in-law—absolutely all the Bashmachkins—used to wear boots which they resoled not more often than three times a year."
"The Overcoat" (1842)
Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange;
it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the
grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing
the reader's own notions of life. Great literature skirts the
irrational. Hamlet is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar.
Gogol's The Overcoat is a grotesque and grim nightmare
making black holes in the dim pattern of life. The
superficial reader of that story will merely see in it the
heavy frolics of an extravagant buffoon; the solemn reader
will take for granted that Gogol's prime intention was to
denounce the horrors of Russian bureaucracy. But neither
the person who wants a good laugh, nor the person who
craves for books "that make one think" will understand
what The Overcoat is really about. Give me the creative
reader; this is a tale for him.
Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov
have all had their moments of irrational insight which
simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret
meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this
shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he
tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to
treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of
talent. When, as in his immortal The Overcoat, he really let
himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private
A page from Nabokov's lecture on "The Overcoat"
abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet
with his drawing of a furred carrick.
produced.
The sudden slanting of the rational plane of life may be accomplished of course in many ways, and every great writer has his own method. With Gogol it was a combination of two movements : a jerk and a glide. Imagine a trap-door that opens under your feet with absurd suddenness, and a lyrical gust that sweeps you up and then lets you fall with a bump into the next traphole. The absurd was Gogol's favorite muse—but when I say "the absurd," I do not mean the quaint or the comic.
The absurd has as many shades and degrees as the tragic has, and moreover, in Gogol's case, it borders upon the latter. It would be wrong to assert that Gogol placed his characters in absurd situations. You cannot place a man in an absurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd; you cannot do this if you mean by "absurd" something provoking a chuckle or a shrug. But if you mean the pathetic, the human condition, if you mean all such things that in less weird worlds are linked up with the loftiest aspirations, the deepest sufferings, the strongest passions—then of course the necessary breach is there, and a pathetic human, lost in the midst of Gogol's nightmarish, irresponsible world would be "absurd," by a kind of secondary contrast.
41
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
On the lid of the tailor's snuff-box there was "the portrait of a General; I do not know what general because the tailor's thumb had made a hole in the general's face and a square of paper had been gummed over the hole." Thus with the absurdity of Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin. We did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be. The essence of mankind is irrationally derived from the chaos of fakes which form Gogol's world. Akaki Akakievich, the hero of The Overcoat, is absurd because he is pathetic, because he is human and because he has been engendered by those very forces which seem to be in such contrast to him.