There is family and fatherland, but for Gogol the question is how to leave them behind as soon as possible. There is an admiring friendship for one man only, and he is a generous genius: Alexander Pushkin, founder of modern Russian literature, the incomparable Pushkin, equal only to Dante and Shakespeare. But a Dante and a Shakespeare eccentrically set in the vast, powerful, enigmatic country that “does not give answers” about its future, as Gogol puts it in the famous final passage of Dead Souls:
And where do you fly to, Russia? Answer me!.. She doesn’t answer. The carriage bells break into an enchanted tinkling, the air is torn to shreds and turns into wind; everything on earth flashes past, and, casting worried, sidelong glances, other peoples and nations step out of her way.
If we compare this passage with the less celebrated epistolary excerpt that I quoted earlier, we come (in the letter) upon several constants of the Gogolian imagination and (in the novel) upon the way the writer transcends his own obsessions. In the letter, there is movement up and down, down and up, as in a column of words: “At my feel bums my past; above me … shines the … future … Here I am, kneeling at your feet.” But this movement is also horizontal, as in a fugue: time cannot be deciphered; it develops through time, a hidden time: a succession of masked days: “I implore thee: Do not hide!” Time, almost by definition, flees, disguises itself, shrouds itself in fog; time is an impostor, a disguised being who always refuses to show us its true face.
The response to time conceived in this way can only be that of a pathetic imagination: kneeling, but without giving up the aspiration toward higher things: going from low to high, from the contemplation of the past that burns “at my feet” to the future that shines “above me.” Time is a constant postponement: a perpetually deferred identity. Poised on the threshold of a year that will be decisive for him, Gogol implores the fruits of an enigmatic, displaced time, vertically conceived, and confronts it with the romantic forms of time and literature: flight, displacement, voyage.
In the landscape of the novel, Gogol draws a vast horizon perpendicular to an erect time. This horizontality has a name: Russia. This name has an object that incarnates it: the troika. And this thing, the troika, moves quickly, aiming for the future, the goal, destiny, sowing admiration and terror among all “other peoples and nations.” But this noisy and swift contraption has two characteristics of its own. The first is that it is driven by a crook, an adventurer, and a rogue (pícaro), a disguised man whose identity is unknown to anyone: a man, in this sense, whose identity depends on who others decide him to be. His name is Chichikov, an embezzler of uncertain identity who deals in identities far more uncertain than his own, those of dead serfs, which the great Russian con man tries to buy from landowners, to declare them to the authorities as having perished in a catastrophe, and so pocket 40,000 rubles, a profit on an investment of 500 rubles, on the basis of five to ten rubies per dead soul.
A deception; but, above all, a postponement of identity. Time does not deliver us its destiny; neither does the character; and the land certainly doesn’t. Why, then, should the writer do so: deliver unto us his destiny or that of his time, his space, his character? The art of Nikolai Gogol swirls around the problem of identities and identification which is postponed, or deceptive. Gogol raises it to literary form with such force and imagination, with such irony and sense of the fantastic, that he actually reaches but one identity, and that is his own identification with the problem of existence.
Let us bear this final triumph of the writer in mind as we consider the multiple formal aspects of his work. For, as Donald Fanger indicates in his admirable book The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, the Russian author exemplified more radically than anyone else in his century the power of the literary medium, and he did so, precisely, through a fusion of form and content. Both are form, and both are content. To investigate where one ends and the other begins is to discover the very nature of Gogol’s art, an art in which Georg Simmel’s warning, quoted by Fanger, becomes the operating principle and evidence of composition: form and content are relative and subjective areas of thought; what is form in one aspect is content in another.
Let me return to the two texts, dissimilar but finally complementary to one another, that I have quoted here. How can we separate in the letter, the vital statistics — the dates, the commonplace of good resolutions for the New Year, Gogol doing what we all do on comparable anniversaries — from the writing; that is, from imagination as applied to time, from the postponement of certitude, from the pathos of a prostrate humiliation, from the evoked expression of desire, and from the expression of a certain unarmed (if not disarming) frankness which, on reflection, we start to understand as false sincerity, a sincerity expressed only to justify sincerity, and thus an insincere sincerity?
What counts is the literary reality of the letter, not the toast to the New Year, and this reality is dynamic, imaginary, and ironic. It responds to the enigma of time with the enigma of man, in the same manner that the invocation of the Russian troika responds to the enigma of a national destiny with one answer only. That answer consists of the irony of the writer who postpones his own destiny and his own identity, in the same way that time and space (the year 1834 and the Russian land) do so, so that all these elements are transformed into the only reality that is truthful, worthy of our attention, or, at the very least, handy: the reality of literature. A fragile reality. Was Gogol’s life less so?
II
Gogol affirms repeatedly that “I have no life outside of literature.” In this, as in so many other things, he is the elder brother to Franz Kafka, who said, “All that is not literature bores me, including conversations about literature.” Kafka writes in his diary: “I hate everything that is not literature.” Gogol foreshadows him: “I have no life outside of literature.”
This attitude, explains Fanger, goes against the grain of the romantic expectation: the creation of a superior art “confers meaning on the person of the creator, confers upon him an exemplary quality,” in relation both to his vision and to his thought, and “stimulates curiosity” about a double transmutation. Conscience and the experience of life become art, and art becomes conscience and experience. Finally, it is the person’s identity that achieves primacy, even if to do so, it must become an artistic identity.
This romantic alchemy is not possible in the case of Gogol. Gogol is the Russian anti-Byron, without Missolonghis or incest, scandal, or duels, or lovers of either sex: no wife, no children. No profound relations with politics, with sex, with society, family, or nation, unless they all serve to reflect an absence and a lie: an exaggeration which in its absence, falsity, or disproportion can evoke the verbal ghosts capable of approximating us to their only reality and their only identity, which is that of a text by Nikolai Gogol.
This radical poetics is essential to understand the artistic and human achievement of Gogol. “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” Dostoevsky said, famously though apocryphally. I always wondered how another writer of such extraordinary magnitude could have said this and why we should believe him. Why does The Idiot come out of “The Overcoat”? Why, as Wordsworth said, is the child the father of the man?