Of this untraditional procedure Sinyavsky writes:
… the accent shifts from the object of speech to speech as a process of objectless intent, interesting in itself and exhausted by itself. Information that is a priori contendess shifts our attention from the material to the means of its verbal organization. Speech about useless objects enters consciousness as a thing, as a ponderable mass, as a fact of language valuable in itself. That is why we perceive Gogol's prose so distinctly as prose, and not as a habitual manner and generally accepted form of putting thoughts into words, nor as an appendix to the content and subject of the story. It has its content and even, if you wish, its subject in itself-this prose which steps forth in the free image of speech about facts not worth mentioning, speech in a pure sense about nothing.
If there is still a mimicry of traditional storytelling in a number of the earlier Ukrainian tales, in others we see much more clearly this shift to "a process of objectless intent," to "speech… about nothing" -particularly in "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt," the last written of the Evenings, and in "Old World Landowners" and "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" from Mirgorod. The element of the supernatural that triggers events in the other Ukrainian tales is almost entirely absent from "Shponka" and "Landowners." Almost, but not quite: Shponka's dream of the multiplying wife, and the she-cat that precipitates the end of the otherwise endless banality of the landowners' existence, are decisive incursions of the supernatural, or the other-natural, into the idyllic placidity of Little Russian farm life. In the story of the two Ivans, however, nothing of the sort happens, and the quarrel of the two friends proves unresolvable. The narrator ends with a dispirited exclamation: "It's dull in this world, gentlemen!" Beneath the unbroken surface of this banal local anecdote (there was in fact such an inseparable, litigious pair living in the town of Mirgorod) some extraordinary transformation should be about to happen, some new reality should be about to appear. For Gogol, the non-occurrence of this transformation became the most "supernatural" subject of all. He developed it in Dead Souls.
In the Petersburg tales the unaccountable sits squarely in the midst of things, like Major Kovalev's nose in the barber's loaf of bread. "Petersburg has no character," Gogol wrote to his mother in 1829, "the foreigners fattening themselves here no longer resemble foreigners, and the Russians in turn have become some sort of foreigners here and are no longer either the one or the other." Where identity is so fluid, memory finds nothing to grasp, no experience is durable enough to be passed on. The phantasmal Petersburg of later Russian literature-of Dostoevsky, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely-made its first appearance in "Nevsky Prospect," the idea for which came to Gogol as early as 1831, when he wrote down some sketches of the Petersburg landscape. It is a landscape of mists, pale colors, dim light, the opposite of his native province, and peopled mainly by government officials of various ranks, among whom Gogol singled out a certain type of petty clerk, the "eternal titular councillor"-Mr. Poprishchin of "The Diary of a Madman," Akaky Akakievich of "The Overcoat"-a type that became as perennial in Russian literature as the phantasmal city that somehow exudes him but will not house him.
Nothing stands still on Nevsky Prospect. People of various ranks appear, disappear, reappear in other guises, changing constantly with the light. "The deceptive nature of reality," as Sinyav-sky notes, "is nowhere so openly and declaredly expressed by Gogol as in 'Nevsky Prospect.' It is not by chance that 'Nevsky Prospect' sets the tone for the other Petersburg tales." The unusual structure of the tale underscores the theme, framing two opposite cases of deception with a more general evocation of the city's atmosphere. Interestingly, in a note published in The Contemporary, Pushkin (who did not live to read "The Overcoat") called "Nevsky Prospect" the fullest, the most complete of Gogol's tales.
The order of ranks is also revealed in these tales as a deception, a pure fiction. Major Kovalev, hero of "The Nose," is a "collegiate assessor made in the Caucasus," meaning made rather quickly. He was "made" rather recently, as well, and is still quite proud of his advancement. One day his nose disappears and then turns up "by himself" in the street wearing the uniform of a state councillor, a civil-service rank roughly equivalent to the military rank of general. Major Kovalev is not even sure of the proper way to address him. The fiction of ranks is also at the center of "The Diary of a Madman." Here, for instance, the awarding of a decoration is described from the family dog's point of view. The dog notices that her usually taciturn master has begun talking to himself, saying, "Will I get it or won't I?" over and over again. A week later he comes home very happy:
All morning gentlemen in uniforms kept coming to him, congratulating him for something. At the table he was merrier than I'd ever seen him before, told jokes, and after dinner he held me up to his neck and said: "Look, Medji, what's this?" I saw some little ribbon. I sniffed it but found decidedly no aroma; finally I licked it on the sly: it was a bit salty.
The keeper of the "Diary," Mr. Poprishchin, also broods on the question of rank, because he is unhappily in love with his chief's daughter, who is in love with a handsome kammerjunker:
Several times already I've tried to figure out where all these differences come from. What makes me a titular councillor and why on earth am I a titular councillor? Maybe I'm some sort of count or general and only seem to be a titular councillor? Maybe I myself don't know who I am… can't I be promoted this minute to governor general, or intendant, or something else like that? I'd like to know, what makes me a titular councillor? Why precisely a titular councillor?
In the end he decides he is the king of Spain, an act of perfect fic-tionizing for which he is taken off to the madhouse.
"The Diary of a Madman" is Gogol's only first-person story, and Mr. Poprishchin is perhaps the most human of his characters. For brief moments a piercing note comes into his voice, as when he asks, "Why precisely a titular councillor?" or when he calls out his last words to his mother: "Dear mother, save your poor son! shed a tear on his sick head! see how they torment him! press the poor orphan to your breast! there's no place for him in the world!" We hear the same note, more briefly still, in the voice of that other titular councillor, Akaky Akakievich, when his fellow clerks torment him unbearably and he finally says: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?" There is something so strange, so pitiable in his voice that one young clerk never forgets it:
And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?"-and in these penetrating words rang other words: "I am your brother." And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands…
These moments of pathos led certain radical critics of Gogol's time, the influential Vissarion Belinsky first among them, to see Gogol as a champion of the little man and an enemy of the existing social order. The same view later became obligatory for Soviet critics. But whatever semblance of social criticism or satire there may be in the Petersburg tales is secondary and incidental. The pathos is momentary, and Gogol packs his clerks off to the madhouse or out of this world with a remarkably cool hand.
The young Dostoevsky, in his first novel, Poor Folk, challenged Gogol's unfeeling treatment of his petty clerk. Dostoevsky's hero, Makar Devushkin, is also a titular councillor and clearly modeled on Akaky Akakievich. He lives by the same endless copying work and suffers the same humiliating treatment from his fellow clerks. But instead of being an automaton whose highest ideals are embodied in a new overcoat, Makar Devushkin is endowed with inner life, personal dignity, and the ability to love. He is also a writer of sorts, concerned with developing his own style. And he is a literary critic. Makar Devushkin reads Gogol's "The Overcoat" and is offended: "And why write such things? And why is it necessary?… Well, it's a nasty little book… It's simply unheard of, because it's not even possible that there could be such a civil servant. No, I will make a complaint… I will make a formal complaint." Makar Devushkin shows the influence of sentimental French social novels on Russian literature of the 1840s. Nothing could be further from the spirit of such writing than Gogol's strange humor. The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message. He saw the fiction of ranks not as an evil to be exposed but as an instance of the groundlessness of reality itself and of the incanta-tory power of words.