Gogol, however, seems to have paid little attention to the details of Ukrainian life while he lived there. He was bent on putting the place behind him, on winning glory in the capital, on performing some lofty deed for the good of all Russia, on becoming a great poet in the German romantic style (the title of his burnt poem was Hans Kuchelgarten). It was only in Petersburg that he discovered the new fashion for the Ukraine and sensed, in Sinyavsky's words, "a 'social commission' from that side, a certain breath of air in the literary lull of the capital, already sated with the
Caucasus and mountaineers and expecting something brisk, fresh, popular from semi-literate Cossackland." Four months after his arrival, on April 30, 1829, he wrote to his mother:
You know the customs and ways of our Little Russians very well, and so I'm sure you will not refuse to communicate them to me in our correspondence. That is very, very necessary for me. I expect from you in your next letter a complete description of the costume of a village deacon, from his underclothes to his boots, with the names used by the most rooted, ancient, undeveloped Little Russians; also the names, down to the last ribbon, for the various pieces of clothing worn by our village maidens, as well as by married women, and by muzhiks… the exact names for clothing worn in the time of the hetmans… a minute description of a wedding, not omitting the smallest detail… a few words about carol singing, about St. John's Eve, about water sprites. There are lots of superstitions, horror stories, traditions, various anecdotes, and so on, current among the people: all of that will be of great interest to me…
So it was with the help of his mother's memory, plus a few books of local history and old Ukrainian epic songs, that Gogol set about creating the Little Russia of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod.
It is a world of proud, boastful Cossacks, of black-browed beauties, of witches, devils, magic spells and enchantments, of drowsy farms and muddy little towns-that is, a stage-set Ukraine, more operatic than real. Holidays and feasting are always close by-in "St. John's Eve" and "The Night Before Christmas" obviously, but also in the wedding that begins "The Terrible Vengeance," in the banqueting that runs through the Mirgorod tales and appears again in "The Carriage," a perfect little anecdote that belongs to this same world. Festive occasions grant special privileges; on festive nights fates are revealed or decided, lovers are separated, enemies are brought together; the natural and the supernatural mingle for good or ill, for comic or horrific effect. The expanded possibilities of festive reality justified the freedom with which Gogol constructed his narratives. But of the real peasant, of conditions under serfdom, of Ukrainian society and its conflicts at the time, there is no more trace in Gogol's tales, even those of the most realistic cast, than there was in his father's comedies. His characters, as Michel Aucouturier notes in the preface to his French translation of Evenings, "are not typical representatives of the Little Russian peasantry, but the young lovers and old greybeards of the theater, Ukrainian descendants of the Cleantes and Elises, the Orgons and Gerontes of Moliere."
The more surprising is the reputation Gogol acquired early, among both conservatives and liberals, as a painter of reality, the founder of the "natural school." Gogol's appearance in Russian literature was so enigmatic that it seems his first critics (Pushkin excepted), while they liked what they read, could not account for their liking of it and invented reasons that were simply beside the point. The real reason was no doubt the unusual texture of Gogol's writing. His prose is a self-conscious artistic medium that mimics the popular manner but in fact represents something other, something quite alien to the old art of storytelling.
In his essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Walter Benjamin wrote: "Experience passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn." And he noted further that "every real story… contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers… Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom." If we turn to Gogol's tales with such words as "experience," "practical advice," "counsel," and "wisdom" in mind, we will see that they are total strangers to the "real story" as Benjamin defines it. Memory is the medium of storytelling, both in the experience that is passed on from mouth to mouth and in the storyteller's act of telling, which is always a retelling. Though he may vary the tale each time he tells it, he will insist that he is faithfully repeating what he heard from earlier storytellers; otherwise it would be something made up, a fiction, a he. Memory is the storyteller's authority, the Muse-derived element of his art. He has the whole tale, the plot, the sequence of events, even the embellishments, in mind before he tells it. Gogol, we might say, has nothing in mind. Memory plays no part in his work. He does not know where the act of writing will lead him. In other words, he belongs not to the order of tradition but to the order of invention. And his best inventions come to him in the writing; he happens upon them- Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka's dream, for instance, which is so unexpected and so transcends the rest of the story that he simply breaks off after it. Hence his way of proceeding by digressions, which often turn out to be the main point of the tale; hence his scorn for the accepted rules of art-unity of action, logical development, formal coherence-and his avoidance of "meaning" and motivation. The discovery of the unaccountable, of the absence of an experience to be passed on, left him permanently surprised. His work was the invention of forms to express it.
If we take what might seem the most traditional of Gogol's tales-"The Terrible Vengeance," for example, or "Viy" (which Gogol calls a "folk legend" and claims to retell almost as simply as he heard it)-we will see that their procedure is precisely antitra-ditional. "The Terrible Vengeance," far from being a naive epic tale of Cossack life, is a studied imitation of the epic manner, a conscious experiment in rhythmic prose, with inevitable elements of parody and a quite unconvincing pathos. No folktale or epic song would end with what amounts to its own prologue, explaining the action after the fact. The structure is highly artificial and peculiarly Gogolian (it occurs again in "The Portrait" and in the first part of Dead Souls), showing his concern with the act of composition and his unconcern with meaning. So, too, in folktales about Ivan the Fool, the hero traditionally undergoes three tests and wins the beautiful daughter in the end. Gogol's "Viy" belongs to the same general type, but the daughter is hardly a prize, and the hero, Khoma Brut, comes to a sorry and quite untraditional end. What makes these stories are countless unpredictable incidents, details, and turns of phrase scattered along the way, and such bravura passages as the famous description of the Dnieper River in "The Terrible Vengeance," the erotic rendering of Khoma Brut's flight with the witch, and the tremendous finale of the tale with the appearance out of nowhere of the monster Viy (who, incidentally, has no source in folklore; he is Gogol's creature and appears literally out of nowhere).