In agony, he receives a certain Father Mathias, a priest with a red beard (again stepping out of a work by Gogol) who assails him on his deathbed: “The debility of your body is no excuse for avoiding the fast!” “Denounce Pushkin, he is a sinner and a pagan!” “Think about saving your soul, not about stringing phrases together on a piece of paper!”
He does not write. He does not eat. He does not sleep. He dreams: diabolical temptations. He prepares for death by wrapping himself in a cold sheet. The final physician, a Dr. Klimmentov, arrives and sprays his head with a mouthful of vodka. Cold water; hot water. Gogol, delirious, exclaims — his last words: “Forward! Charge, charge the windmill!”
The step toward death is the step toward the written page: Gogol the character in Gogol dies invoking Don Quixote and enters the living tomb of the book, the source of modern narrative: the Cervantean universe. What matter if his funerals are Gogolian unto death? Slavophiles and Occidentalists fight for the privilege of burying the tiny body crowned in laurels and seemingly made of wax. The earthly struggle resolves itself in final chaos: the mob invades the church, everyone wishes to kiss the writer’s dead hand, pluck a leaf from the wreath, ascertain if the cadaver laughs still; they overturn the bier; they flee.
Gogolian Gogol is dead. He leaves as inheritance only a golden watch that almost certainly belonged to Alexander Pushkin, and an overcoat with a velour collar that perhaps belonged to Akaky Akakyevich.
IV
Gogol’s complete works were in the process of being printed when the writer died in 1852. Censorship immediately suppressed them. Gogol, who in life wanted only to be a man of order, respectful of constituted authority, was feared, says Troyat, in death. Did he become a revolutionary when he died?
Rather, Gogol’s ghost, a character in Gogol, continued to refuse all forms of facile characterization: he was neither Andreev’s tragic Gogol nor the heroic Gogol of Stalin. He was only a writer whose life and death confuse and construe themselves (or reconstruct themselves, since life and work are also constantly annihilating each other in the act of creation/re-creation) in a pulverized encounter of minimal humors and spectral anti-matter: life and work, work and life.
Gogol’s life and work germinate from a microscopic reality which breeds thanks to an anomalous vision of things: deformed, eccentric, grotesque. Traditional criticism has lent minute attention to Gogol’s perverse inclination to give human faces and bodies the form of grotesque and banal objects. In Dead Souls, for example, there are characters whose faces are like elongated cucumbers, or like the gourds from which balalaikas are made. Plyushkin the landlord has eyes that spring like swift little mice from under his high, bushy eyebrows. And in “Nevsky Prospekt,” the ladies’ sleeves would allow them to rise suddenly in the air “if their escorts did not hold them back.” “To lift a lady in the air”—concludes the Gogolian sentence—“is as easy and enjoyable … as taking a glass of champagne to one’s lips.”
Gogol’s fiction is dominated by sudden change, says Fanger. But the point is not to evoke the several metamorphoses, descendants of Ovid and forerunners of Kafka, that illustrate many of Gogol’s tales: the transformations of women and witches in the Mirgorod tales; the transformation of a man into his own nose in the tale of that name. Rather, the point is to understand that the theme of transformation — of change — is deeply important; it is, in a way, the root of all things: the reality of reality, so to speak.
Gogol puts it beautifully in “Nevsky Prospekt.” The symbol of romantic purity, the painter Piskaryov, for whom the loss of purity is identical to the loss of intelligence, has followed a strikingly beautiful girl down the principal avenue in Petersburg, the Nevsky Prospekt. The girl, as you may recall, leads the painter to the castle of impurity. On entering the bordello, Piskaryov discovers that his sweetheart is a courtesan, as foolish as she is vulgar. He loses his ideal but he gains his dream. And yet, between both — ideal and dream — a sensation of intense restlessness permits the author to understand that “a demon had broken the whole world into pieces, immediately mixing them up without any order.”
Metamorphosis, which is one of Gogol’s great themes, means something that goes beyond sudden change, and this something is the reconstitution of our original unity, broken and tossed to the winds by diabolical forces: we do not know who we are; what we take to be real is a deceit; the task of men and women, especially of the artist, above all of the artist, is to struggle, with no hope of victory, but without losing heart, to discover the hidden reality, the reality one can reconstitute behind the appearance of dispersion. There is a true reality behind the screen of social position, bureaucratic function, the false identity that others give us, and, above all, behind a falsifying use of language.
I shall say of the art of Luis Buñuel that rupture is the price of experience. But it is also the condition of poetry, nurtured by the plurality of the senses. This acceptance of the diverse permits art to truly aspire to and perhaps to actually reconquer the unifying vision. The paradox of the poetic is that it feeds on this rupture while at the same time trying to heal it and build a new unity on the synthesis of lost originality and concrete experience.
One could say something similar about the art of Nikolai Gogol. The Gogolian metamorphosis is not gratuitous. It is no mere spectacular effect. And it is no simple diversion (which it could, legitimately, be). In Gogol, it is not, because metamorphosis does not stop at its own game but, rather, insistently presents itself as the basis for a whole formal and thematic construction, without which it would be difficult to conceive modern fiction.
V
“Nevsky Prospekt lies at each hour of the day and night,” writes Gogol as he concludes his first tale of St. Petersburg. It is the devil himself who there lights the street lamps and sheds light on men and things, but only so as to “show them under an illusory and untruthful aspect.”
In order to see reality once more, transcend lies, and clarify deceit, Gogol sets up quite a literary strategy. He asks us, first of all, to confide in perspective, but also in proximity. The lenses we need to see the sun are as necessary as those we require to see insects.
Yet we shall see nothing at all unless we bathe the whole world in the light of strangeness. Reality will always deceive us if we complacently accept it as such. Gogol — this is his second weapon, following that of metamorphosis — invites us to conceive reality as a deception and violently wake up through the sensation of strangeness that the writer, with quite extraordinary results, employs throughout his work. Donald Fanger has remarked that it is almost impossible to render outside of the Russian language this Gogolian strangeness, what he calls this rendering strange, or ostranenie, which first expresses itself through the communication of language. But if Gogol’s language does not carry over in translation, the style does: in Gogol, it is the style of a strangeness which orchestrates the multiple voices of the narrative and of the dialogue. Gogol creates a new literary discourse based on synecdoche, in which a detail reveals the totality — the Latin formula of the pars pro toto—and so integrates a mosaic style, or an orchestra style, in which disparate and discrete elements unite to create the illusion of totality.