Gogol lives his short life — barely forty-two years — as a long illness or, better still, as a fatigue.
In this, too, he resembles Kafka, who in his notes jots down a legend of Prometheus in which “all are finally fed up with this senseless legend. The Gods are tired, the eagles are tired, the wound heals painfully.” This image of a tragic fatigue brings to mind Nietzsche’s affirmation: “Whoever has built a new heaven has found the strength to do so only in his own hell.” Camus sees in Prometheus the great myth of the rebellious intelligence: he is the father of messianism, fraternity, and the refusal of death.
But where Camus may see an intelligent rebellion and Kafka an equally lucid fatigue, Gogol would have found the intelligence of an absence. Camus describes a rebellious and melodramatic intelligence, not tragic, which can never decide that its enemy is right. Kafka embodies a tired intelligence as the root of his own lucidity. Gogol, finally, represents the lucidity of absence. His true biography, Donald Fanger implies, can only be expressed as art, as implication, as absence.
Fanger adds: “He did not come to define himself through being bound in some continuing experiential way to class or politics or place, and if he was a slave to his body, he contrived to be that in the way that could not further his self-knowledge through experience of another.”
Gogol’s reflection on and knowledge of the body is limited to the realms of hypochondria and the functioning (or nonfunctioning) of the digestive system. His sole personal erotic text is perhaps a letter of the year 1837, written as he watches the slow agony of a beautiful Russian youth, Joseph Vielgorsky, in Rome. To be sure, there is nothing to be gained by speculating on the probable impotence or homoeroticism of Gogol. The importance of the circumstance is that for Gogol the other’s body is only attractive in extremis: the body is only desirable in death or the proximity of death.
But this fact, along with the rest of his short life, has no reality except insofar as it translates into literature, and one cannot say that necrophilia is a central erotic factor in Gogoclass="underline" death, in his work, is also ironical. Akaky Akakyevich, the petty Petersburg bureaucrat, returns as a ghost to frighten and despoil the owners of elegant topcoats. Irony is always a displacement of identity (it is also, at all times, the only possible relation with the present): who are the dead, the list of serfs, or the landlords who sell them to Chichikov: Sobakevich, Plyushkin, Nozdryov?
The author’s manifest intentions perhaps deserve more respect than any psycholiterary speculation: life is indistinguishable from literature: “I live and breathe through my works.” That is why Fanger entitles his book The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Not the art of Gogol separate from the life of Gogol, but the creation of the work as a reality inseparable from the creation of the man. The measure of Gogol the individual is that of his art. Gogol has no existence outside of his art, and his art is but the projection of the absence of his life. Like Akaky Akakyevich in “The Overcoat,” like Khlestakov in The Inspector, and like Chichikov in Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol is also a character in a text.
I do not think, therefore, that I betray Donald Fanger’s intentions if I dare, in passing, to invert his definition in order to find in Nikolai Gogol the most Gogolian of characters: Gogol created his own life as if it occurred in a Gogol story.
Balzac said that “reality has taken great pains to imitate fiction.” He meant by this something that people in Latin America understand fully: reality constantly surpasses the imagination of its inventors. The Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna has not yet found an imagination that encompasses his grotesque splendor; we have many other contemporary characters who equally surpass the imaginative fever of any contemporary Gogol. The autumns of our patriarchs are, naturally, also winters and springs, as well as dog days of a quietude akin to death.
In 1967, in London, Vargas Llosa and I invited a group of Latin American novelists to contribute to a book that would be titled The Fathers of the Fatherlands. Each of them — Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar, Miguel Otero Silva — would write fifty pages on his favorite national tyrant. But it turned out to be impossible to coordinate that many dissimilar wills. The book did not jell, but from this initiative were born The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I, the Supreme. Surely, in this original idea as well as in its rich, although unforeseen, results, it was not only the model of past reality — Juan Vicente Gómez, Cipriano Castro, Doctor Francia — that permitted the creation of these works, but, perhaps above all, the quality of the imagination of García Márquez, Carpentier, and Roa Bastos. The dictators rest — in peace or in torture, who can know? — but securely in their graves. Their paper reality was not determined by any event in their lives. And yet: can we now imagine those lives without the refraction given us by those novels?
The life of Nikolai Gogol occupies this singular position in relation to his own work: it lacks any interest except if it is seen as the creation of Nikolai Gogol. The text presupposes the life in the sense that the latter has any sense (or is legible) as a text by Gogol. Retrospectively, although simultaneously, that life is part of a Gogolian universe which transcends the author and his works in order to create a Gogolian tradition. Its contemporary lineage is clear in such works as those by Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera. But Gogol himself is the heir to the carnival tradition of literature employed by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the work of Rabelais, as he is the heir also of the tradition of Cervantes, whose grand themes coincide notoriously with those cited by Fanger to explain Gogoclass="underline" metamorphosis, the road, displacement, identity, recognition.
Only within these bounds do I speak of a Gogolian life inseparable from a Gogolian work and a Gogolian tradition.
III
Gogolian Gogoclass="underline"
Donald Fanger recalls two statues of the author. One, done in 1909, is by the sculptor Andreev. Seated wrapped in an overcoat, head hanging and shoulders drooping, Nikolai Gogol is a figure of perverse melancholy. The statue reflects a work that, according to Merezhkovsky, was “a long exercise in artistic deformation.” The other statue, erected in Moscow on orders from Stalin on the occasion of the writer’s one hundredth anniversary, presents a tall, erect, defiant man, his eyes blazing, his chin thrust forward: this is Gogol the realist, Gogol the progressive, Gogol the citizen about to jump onto his tractor. Useless to remember that the apparition of the second statue signified the disappearance of the first, which was restored only on the death of the dictator.
Between both statues — the tragic, the heroic — jumps a gnome. This is Gogol the character in Gogol, the “new” student who arrives from the Ukrainian countryside at the school of higher sciences at Nezhin, with a beaked profile and a little head bobbing out of his winter clothing as if out of a collar of feathers. A bird hermetically sealed, writes his fellow student Lubich-Romanovich, inside his excessive clothes, far too warm for the climate. He lakes a long time to undress, adds the school companion. The clothing — the overcoat — is a carapace like Samsa’s in The Metamorphosis: the body is absent, its presence and its pleasure postponed.
He is called “the mysterious dwarf.” He must, his biographer Henri Troyat tells us, be secretive: secrecy is the spring of his life. He writes to his mother from schooclass="underline" “No one hears me complain … I praised those who were the cause of my disgrace. It is true that for all of them I am an enigma. No one guesses who I am…” This human enigma, beaked bird and mysterious gnome, appears in the academic, bureaucratic, editorial, and literary world of Russia. He is a reality that is also a deception: his mother believes that Gogol, like a character in Gogol, is the author of all the successful novels published in Russia. The son is responsible for sowing the seed of this new deception. He is what he is, but with a dimension that disguises him and deceives all others. The disguise can be quite delirious: his mother comes to believe, and says so to anyone wishing to listen to her, that her son Nikolai Gogol is the genius who has invented all the technological marvels appearing in Russia, one after the other, in those days. Mother attributes to son nothing less than the invention of the railroad engine and the steamship. Mother is son’s accomplice, the ideal reader of Gogol the character in Gogol.