Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts 9781618115836

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Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol Petersburg Texts and Subtexts

Liber Primus Series Editor: David Bethea (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Editorial Board: Caryl Emerson (Princeton University) Svetlana Evdokimova (Brown University) John Mackay (Yale University) Irina Reyfman (Columbia University) Justin Weir (Harvard University)

Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol Petersburg Texts and Subtexts Kathleen Scollins

Boston 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names:  Scollins, Kathleen, 1971- author. Title:  Acts of logos in Pushkin and Gogol Petersburg texts and subtexts / Kathleen Scollins. Description:  Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2017. Series:  Liber primus Identifiers:  LCCN 2017005317 (print) | LCCN 2017020784 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618115836 (e-book) | ISBN 9781618115829 (hardcover) Subjects:  LCSH: Saint Petersburg (Russia)—In literature. | Russian literature— 19th century—History and criticism. | Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799-1837—Criticism and interpretation. | Gogol’, Nikolaæi Vasil’evich, 1809-1852—Criticism and interpretation. | Personification in literature. | Symbolism in literature. Classification:  LCC PG3015.5.S27 (ebook) | LCC PG3015.5.S27 S36 2017 (print) | DDC 891.71/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005317 ©Academic Studies Press, 2017 ISBN 978-1-61811-582-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-61811-583-6 (e-book) Cover design by Irina Golovenok Book design by Kryon Publishing Services (P) Ltd. www.kryonpublishing.com Published by Academic Studies Press in 2017 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA P: (617)782–6290 F: (857)241–3149 [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents Acknowledgments Prologue: In the Beginning was Peter’s Word Introduction: St. Petersburg Myth, Text, Word

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1. Cursing at the Whirlwind The Book of Job according to Pushkin

1

2. Gambling Away the Petri-mony Rival Models of Social Advancement in Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades”

41

3. Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself Nevsky Prospect as the Hellmouth of Gogol’s Petersburg

80

4. Mertvye ushi The Annunciation Motif and Disorder of the Senses in “The Nose”

125

5. Kako sdelan Akakii Letter as Hero in “The Overcoat”

175

Conclusion: Beyond the Schism Works Cited Index

219 246 273

Acknowledgments This book started as a dissertation written at the University of Wisconsin, and developed over my time at the University of Vermont, but its central idea was conceived much earlier, while I was a student in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. Any first book, of course, is a collective effort; this one, cultivated over the course of ten years at two institutions, with roots stretching back an additional decade, has gathered a larger debt of gratitude than I could possibly acknowledge in just a few pages. I will do my best, however, to recognize here the many instances of inspiration, help, and encouragement I received from an enormous and supportive network of professors and peers, students, friends, and family. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my professors at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UW– Madison. Beyond the rigor and enthusiasm of their instruction, they also provided us a scholarly model that united ardent intellectual inquiry with generous collegiality, and I am grateful to all of them for both the knowledge they imparted and the supportive community they fostered. In particular, I would like to thank my extraordinary dissertation advisor, David Bethea, for his patience, trust, and open-mindedness. He granted me the time and intellectual freedom I needed to follow even my most whimsical ideas to their limit, gently pulling me back whenever I stretched too far. I am grateful both for his scholarly guidance and for his continued encouragement and support in the years following my defense. I also wish to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, whose thoughtful feedback and suggestions helped shape the transformation from dissertation to book: Andrew Reynolds, who read endless drafts of my chapters and offered countless sources and ideas; Judith Kornblatt, whose incisive readings of my Gogol drafts were invaluable, and who reminded me to always “look to the text” for answers; Toma Longinovic, who introduced me to the literature on monstrosity and alterity that would directly inform my Gogol chapters; and the historian David McDonald, who was always generous and supportive of dissertators in the Slavic department. Beyond my committee, I would also like to thank Alexander Dolinin for his inspired and inspiring

Acknowledgments

scholarship on St. Petersburg; David Danaher for being a model of humor, intellectual inquisitiveness, and generous humanity; and Ben Rifkin, who has been an incredible mentor to me in my professional life and beyond. I must also mention Jean Hennessey and Lori Hubbard, department administrators during my years in Madison, without whose calm competence and humor the department would surely have ceased to function. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the German and Russian department at the University of Vermont for providing such an encouraging intellectual environment. In particular, I would like to thank my Chair, Helga Schreckenberger, for her fierce and unflagging support throughout the tenure process; fellow-Romanticist Dennis Mahoney for his meticulous readings and insightful questions; the indefatigable Wolfgang Mieder, living embodiment of the teacher/scholar model; Kevin McKenna, who believed in me from the start, and whose dedication to his students is an inspiration; and my faculty mentor Jennifer Dickinson, for seven years of sustenance, both emotional and edible. Over the years, I have presented various sections and chapters of this book at both national ASEEES and AATSEEL conferences, and smaller symposia at UW, UVM, and Colby College, and am thankful to the members of those audiences for their questions and ideas. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in The Pushkin Review 16 (November, 2014), and a version of chapter 5 appeared in The Russian Review 71 (April, 2012); I am indebted to the editors and reviewers at those journals, as well as to all the readers and reviewers of the full manuscript, for their sharp eyes and superb insights. Feedback from these generous (mostly anonymous) scholars was of inestimable value as the book underwent its long, sometimes painful evolution from the dissertation stage. Most of all, I am grateful to everyone I worked with at Academic Studies Press, in particular the acquisitions editors Faith Wilson Stein and David Michelson, copy-editor Carolyn Pouncy, and production editor Kira Nemirovsky. They completed every stage of the process quickly, professionally, and meticulously, and they were a pleasure to work with. I am also indebted to UVM’s department of German and Russian for their generosity in paying ASP’s subvention fee, which contributed to the cost of the book’s publication. While the book was written and published in the U.S., its central ideas were conceived long ago in St. Petersburg, as my friends Ira Golovenok and Olga Susareva introduced me to every corner of their beloved city, from its

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imperial facades to its seedy dvory. Were it not for the intimate knowledge they shared with me, during rooftop picnics and sole-wearing ekskursii, I would never have fallen so deeply in love with Russia’s imperial capital. I am particularly thrilled that Ira—whose artist’s eye for every detail of her city was one of the book’s original inspirations—has agreed to design its cover. I am also grateful to all my friends at the UW for making graduate school such a happy and intellectually vital time in my life: to Erik McDonald, Matt Walker, Ben Jens, Vika Thorstensson, Amanda Murphy, Molly Blasing, Brian Johnson, Sarah Orman, and many others for their encouragement, advice, and assistance with every aspect of writing, down to the minutest formatting question; and, especially, to Molly Peeney, for talking me through every stage of this project with extraordinary patience, wit and empathy. I would also like to thank my oldest friend, Gillian Bell, who listened attentively to every new idea, however far-fetched, and always had a creative direction to suggest. Enormous thanks go out to my undergraduate students at the UW and UVM, whose probing questions and lively discussions enriched many of the book’s central premises; and particularly to my ingenious work-study student Liza Shkurina who, among other valuable tasks, researched Russian copyright law and found usable versions of every illustration in the manuscript. Moving further back in time, I would also like to thank my own undergraduate professors in the Bryn Mawr College Russian department, particularly George Pahomov and Elizabeth Allen, who fed my fascination with Russian literature, and inspired me (correctly) to abandon the pre-med track and embrace my budding obsession with Bely and Dostoevsky; I can only dream of someday inspiring one of my own students to abandon chemistry for Chekhov . . . Finally, I would like to thank my family (Mary, Michael, and Anne Scollins, Alice and Tom Hogarty, Becky and Bill Minier, and all brothers- and sisters-in-law) for their unflagging faith and support over these many, many years. I am grateful beyond words to my husband Brian for listening, reading, proofing, editing, questioning, pushing, consoling, cheering, and reminding me always of the big picture. He has made everything possible, and our children Ivan and Maisie have made it all infinitely more meaningful (if more time-­consuming). It is to my family that I dedicate this book; I could not have done it (and would not have wanted to) without their constant support, ­encouragement, and understanding.

Prologue In the Beginning was Peter’s Word

Things come to life in St. Petersburg. Ever since metal softened into flesh in The Bronze Horseman, Alexander ­Pushkin’s famous poema to Peter the Great’s new capital, the city has provided a literary space in which inanimate things spring into life. From statues to noses, overcoats to words, and even sounds and letters themselves, these objects take on flesh and stroll through the pages of literary Petersburg. Meanwhile, in mute contrast to these awakened objects, the city’s human occupants—the ­ostensible “heroes” of these tales—remain almost ostentatiously voiceless, silenced ­variously by madness, incoherence, or social position. What aspects of the city’s literary heritage produce this strange alchemy, this peculiar Petersburg c­ ondition in which matter passes into life, and life back into shadow? Of course, such ozhivlenie (vivification or “coming to life”) is hardly confined to Petersburg literature. The Pygmalion myth from Ovid’s ­Metamorphoses—in which the sculptor Pygmalion caresses, kisses, pleads, and finally prays into life the ivory figure he has sculpted—represents one ­particularly productive iteration of this phenomenon of divine animation. The Pygmalion motif has been retold and transformed countless times in the Western canon, from the Middle Ages through the modern age.1 A few of its most famous variations appear in the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in which Hermione appears to warm from stone back into flesh; in Shaw’s comic play Pygmalion,   1 Angela Moorjani names works by Chaucer, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Goethe, Hoffmann, Hawthorne, and Shaw as some of the most important reworkings of the Pygmalion motif in world literature. See Angela B. Moorjani, The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 3. For a survey of postclassical retellings of the Pygmalion myth, see Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English ­Literature (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001); for an in-depth exploration of the theme in literature and art, see Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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in which phonetics professor Henry Higgins falls in love with the eloquent society lady he has coaxed out of a Cockney flower girl; and in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which retired detective Scottie Ferguson attempts to resurrect his dead beloved Madeleine through the forcible transfiguration of another woman. The sculptural myth has been richly elaborated in Russian literature as well, particularly in the poetry of Pushkin, as Roman Jakobson famously detailed in his influential “The Statue in Puškin’s Poetic Mythology.”2 It is curious to note that, before Pushkin brought Étienne Falconet’s most famous monument to life on the page, the sculptor had produced his own statue of Pygmalion with his marble-to-flesh creation, Galatea.3 And Falconet’s Bronze Horseman itself—the steed rearing up, frozen at the very moment of its leap into Russia’s future—carries on the spirit of Pygmalion as well, both visually and literarily, though its own “animation” will be fully realized only later, when the Horseman is brought to textual life by another artist. The theme of material animation in a broader sense runs like a rich vein through world literature from its very origins; it has been most productively mined in mythology and folklore, children’s literature, and science fiction. Bits and pieces of the material world—broomsticks, carpets, chess pieces, dolls, and playing cards, to name just a few—cross over into the living in texts from the Greeks and the Grimms through J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. In the archetypal example, an object is brought to life by a god or other supernatural force: Gaia, Brahma, a witch or wizard, a fairy godmother. In looser adaptations of the motif, powerful authority figures—often male—can also effect the ­transformation: a professor, a police detective, a scientist. Though not restricted to the literature of Petersburg, the phenomenon of supernatural animation nonetheless constitutes a marked and well-developed element within it. The first few decades of the city’s literary tradition alone witnessed a bronze statue in pursuit of a young clerk; a playing-card queen winking at an officer; a nose donning a uniform and strolling along Nevsky Prospect; a man taking an overcoat as his life companion; and yet more cards   2 Roman Jakobson, “The Statue in Puškin’s Poetic Mythology,” in Puškin and His Sculptural Myth, trans. and ed. John Burbank (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 1–44.   3 Pygmalion and Galatea, exhibited in 1763. For more on this sculpture and its reception, see Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 42–43.

Prologue

fluttering to demonic life in a game of shtoss. Beyond these enchanted or inspired objects, the pages of the Petersburg text host instances of animation of a more figurative sense, as well: the Neva writhes and moans in her bed like an invalid; a clerk’s double is suddenly made flesh; a young ex-student is ­metaphorically brought back to life; and words, letters, and even sounds seem to take on life in the streets of Peter’s capital.4 In this particular tradition, there is no master massaging life into his marble beloved; rather, these objects appear to be animated by the peculiar aura of the city itself: Petersburg, called into life ex nihilo, in turn provides a fertile literary environment in which dead matter ­periodically gasps into existence. The theme of “coming to life” might represent a thrilling feature of ­Petersburg literature, but it is, in fact, only a manifestation of a larger verbal phenomenon. This book addresses the question of ozhivlenie in Petersburg by analyzing the powerful, performative function of language in the city’s ­literature. The introduction offers a close analysis of Petersburg’s underlying creation myth—in which the tsar Peter appears as a godlike creator, calling his city forth from nothing—in order to unearth an essential motivation for the significance of verbal fiat in the works that stem from it. Each of the chapters examines one of the foundational tales of the city’s early literary tradition—Alexander ­Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades,” Nikolai Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Nose,” and “The Overcoat”—in order to uncover the critical, transformative role that language plays in each. I explore this problem of logos (the acts of the creative word, or the Word-made-flesh) within t­ raditional biblical or historical frameworks, advancing close, comparative readings of each work and postulating new or underexplored subtexts to these very familiar texts. Tracing the creative word through these five early nineteenth-century works exposes a pattern of verbal creation, oppression, and rebellion ­f undamental to the city’s narrative, equally crucial to its underlying mythos and its continuing literary tradition. I argue that the unexpected awakening of everyday matter in these texts—sculptures, body parts, articles of clothing—emblematizes the fundamental unnaturalness of Peter’s creation   4 Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades”; Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” and “The Overcoat”; Mikhail Lermontov’s unfinished novel Shtoss; Fedor ­Dostoevsky’s The Double and Crime and Punishment; Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.

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and, more important, dramatizes the struggle over language and power inherent to the city’s literary and political traditions. These startling acts of literary animation, which emanate from the verbal challenges issued time and again by Peter’s most subjugated human subjects, draw attention to the creative word as a potent response to an oppressive political order.

Introduction St. Petersburg Myth, Text, Word

“Peter’s Creation”: Peter the Great, His City, and Its Mythos Although only three centuries have passed since Peter the Great decreed his newborn city the capital of Russia, St. Petersburg has become the empire’s most “literary” of spaces; in fact, the city is so frequently cast in textual terms that at times it seems to have been fashioned as much out of pen and ink as out of granite and iron. Given the vaporous literary atmosphere surrounding the city, it is perhaps not surprising that even its relatively modern origins should be fogged over by myth. Certain facts remain solid and undisputed: it is known, for instance, that Petersburg was founded in 1703 as a military fortress. Several basic details of the city’s provenance, however, are missing; scholars disagree, for instance, on precisely when the city was named Russia’s new capital.1 Perhaps the fictional aura surrounding Petersburg explains why certain “factual” matters remain indistinct. The city’s prehistory, at least, is well established: in the late seventeenth century, the reformist tsar Peter I set out to transform the ancient, isolated tsardom of Russia into a modern European state. He was determined to rip out primitive tradition at the root, and his reforms would violently transform every aspect of Russian culture, from its political and social institutions all the way down to its linguistic fabric.2 In a stroke against the Orthodox Church, he   1 According to most scholars, the capital was moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg around 1712. See P. N. Petrov, Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga s osnovaniia goroda do vvedeniia v deistvie vybornogo gorodskogo upravleniia po uchrezhdeniiam o guberniiakh, 1703–1782 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2004), 57.   2 Biographical information on Peter the Great is adapted from M. M. Bogoslovskii, Petr Velikii: Materialy dlia biografii, ed. S. O. Shmidt and A. V. Mel’nikov (Moscow: Nauka, 2005); N. I. Pavlenko, Petr Velikii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1990); and Lindsey Hughes, Peter the Great: A ­Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

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famously ordered all long beards to be cut off, casting himself as state barber and levying a “beard tax” on those who failed to conform; he forced his subjects to wear fashionable European clothes and to dance the minuet at balls and soirées; he reorganized the military, the civil service, and even the Cyrillic alphabet along meritocratic lines, exiling certain outmoded letters and reordering the rest. He even altered time itself, declaring that modern Russians should count the year from the birth of Christ, rather than from the purported creation of the world; five and a half millennia evaporated overnight as the year was reset from 7207 to 1700. And most radically, of course, Peter founded a new, European-style city in a frozen, swampy corner of his empire and transferred the capital from the ancient Russian city of Moscow to the infant city of Sankt Piterburkh, whose Dutch-inflected name proclaimed its founder’s Western influences. The new city, with its neoclassical architecture and radial layout, served as the ultimate physical emblem of Russia’s radical modernization. Though the choice of site was dictated more by military and commercial necessity than by symbolism, Petersburg would soon be celebrated as a “window to Europe,” a port city that would open up the insular, backward empire to the West.3 Despite these solid-seeming historical foundations, however, the city of Petersburg would prove particularly susceptible to mythology. As many scholars have noted, it is a distinctly ahistorical city: founded late (two years after Detroit, Michigan, but within the ancient bounds of Russia), on a ­legendarily empty space, Petersburg lacks an organic history of its own.4 And in the absence of history, mythology rushes in to fill out the missing narrative.5   3 This famous formula was first recorded by Italian visitor Francesco Algarotti in his 1760 A Sampling of Letters about Russia; Pushkin quoted the line from memory (“Pétersbourg est la fenêtre par laquelle la Russie regarde en Europe”) and popularized it in The Bronze Horseman. See N. A. Nekrasov, Petersburg: The Physiology of a City, ed. Thomas Gaiton Marullo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 32n29.   4 In his 1842 article “Moscow and Petersburg,” the philosopher Aleksandr Herzen famously called Petersburg “a city without history” (in Moskva-Peterburg: Pro et Contra [St. Petersburg: lzdatel’stvo Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2000], 177). The “emptiness” of the original site is as mythical as the rest of its origin story—in fact, there were a number of populated settlements, including the fortress known as Nienshkants (Swedish Nyenskans), which had to be captured before the foundations of the new Russian city could be laid. See Petrov, Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga, 36–38; and James Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 136–38.   5 As literary scholar and semiotician Yuri Lotman wrote, “The lack of history gave rise to a tumultuous growth of mythology. Myth filled the semiotic void, and the situation of the

Introduction

In Julie Buckler’s words, “some cities are more ‘storied’ than others”;6 in the case of St. Petersburg, the city’s identity depends almost entirely on the myths, legends, and literature surrounding it, since its actual history (and geography) is but a lacuna. In a popular Finnish legend, Petersburg was built by a bogatyr (legendary warrior hero), who planted house after house on the marshy grounds, only to watch the greedy swamp swallow them up. Finally, knitting his black brows and wrinkling his head in thought, the colossus opened his hand and constructed an entire city on his palm, then lowered it to the ground. As the swamp could not swallow the city whole, it was forced to submit to the great man’s will; Petersburg remained whole.7 Other oral lore associated the city’s miraculous emergence not with the heavens but with the underworld: one eighteenth-century nickname for the city was “stone devil, risen from the swampy abyss” (kamennyi d’iavol, vosstavshii iz bolotnoi ­khliabi).8 These origin stories demonstrate popular perceptions of the city as a profoundly unnatural phenomenon that materialized suddenly, as though fully formed, on the banks of the Baltic Sea. But the most famous myths of Petersburg’s genesis are associated with its visionary progenitor, Peter the Great. Few cities are as closely associated with a single historical figure as is Petersburg with its founder. Although successive rulers all contributed to the character and look of the new city, in the public imagination and the poetic record, Petersburg would always remain a product of the will of a single individual: “Peter’s creation” (Petra tvoren’e), in Pushkin’s famous formulation. According to the most persistent legends, Peter ­handpicked the site of the original fortress, marching his troops through the swamps to find the ideal location: “Surveying the island, he took a soldier’s bayonet, cut two pieces of turf, and, laying them in a cross, said, ‘Let there be a city here’ [Zdes’ artificial city proved extremely mythogenic” (Iu. M. Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” Izbrannye stat’i, 3 vols. [Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992–93], 2:14).   6 Julie Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17.   7 N. A. Sindalovskii, Legendy i mify Sankt-Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Fond “Leningradskaia galereia,” 1994), 16–17. The legend’s focused attention on the bogatyr’s head (brows, forehead, black eyes lit with “diabolical flames”) and deep thought (“Togda bogatyr’ zadumalsia [. . .] Dolgo dumal bogatyr’ i pridumal”) renders the city a product of the creator-figure’s mind. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 370n8.   8 V. N. Burlak, Tainstvennyi Peterburg: Legendy severnoi stolitsy (Moscow: AiF-Print, 2002), 146.

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byt’ gorodu]; at that moment, an eagle miraculously appeared, hovering above the tsar.”9 Peter’s legendary decree (to his soldiers? to the earth?) rhetorically echoed the divine “Let there be light” of Genesis, bearing within it the ­implication that Peter had called his city forth from nothing, by proclamation alone, as though his Word itself had given birth to the city.10 Peter’s defining act assumed mythologized form almost instantly in the national psyche, taking on sacred dimension in both sanctioned (written) ­literature and oral legend. The founding of Petersburg was glorified in the poetic record as a modern-day miracle of the northern swamps: the transformation of nothing into something; the coaxing of chaos into cosmos. In early odes, Peter appears as a divine creator, a demiurge of modern Russia: in the first of his “Inscriptions for a Statue of Peter the Great,” composed in the 1740s, Mikhail Lomonosov declares him an “earthly god”; and in his 1755 “Ode to the Emperor Peter the Great,” Aleksandr Sumarokov opines that, were it not for the C ­ hristian injunction against sacrilege, Peter would be recognized “not as a tsar but as a god.” While this rhetorical tradition of deification lasted throughout the ­eighteenth century, among the devout narod (folk) Peter was regarded as a demonic figure: he was denounced as the Antichrist by the Old Believers of the Orthodox Church, who recognized apocalyptic warning signs in his sweeping program of reform (the imposition of foreign dress and customs, the forced secularization of Russian society) and alarming personal appearance and habits (his giant size; his use of alcohol, tobacco, and coarse language).11 Pushkin would draw on this ambiguity in The Bronze Horseman, hailing him at once as a   9 For these and other legends surrounding the founding of Petersburg, see N. A. Sindalovskii, Legendy i mify Sankt-Peterburga and Peterburgskii fol’klor (St. Petersburg: Maksima, 1994); Burlak, Tainstvennyi Peterburg; and M. N. Vlasova, Tainy Severnoi stolitsy: Legendy i predaniia Sankt-Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012). Buckler has commented on the difficulties inherent in chronicling oral legends, which are “everywhere asserted and nowhere documented” (Mapping St. Petersburg, 128); despite the seeming impossibility of sourcing and recording rumors, however, these scholars have compiled rich collections of the lore associated with the early city. 10 Another little-known legend from that time—in which an old man appears in the camps of the Russian army on a May night in 1703, points toward the Finnish gulf, and repeats several times, “May Peter’s city be here” (Byt’ gradu Petra)—offers a twist on the perceived oral genesis of the city (Burlak, Tainstvennyi Peterburg, 33). 11 For more on popular images of Peter, including his identification with the Antichrist, see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 74–85; and Kevin Platt, “Antichrist Enthroned: Demonic

Introduction

­ onderworking builder (stroitel’ chudotvornyi) and an idol (kumir, gordelivyi w istukan). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the balance would shift decisively away from the old panegyric image of a divinity toward one of an unholy pretender-God, a false creator whose brash reforms had infected the pure body of holy Rus’—ancient homeland of the Russians—with insidious Western ideas. Peter’s extraordinary creation was likewise subject to binary verbal ­representation. Almost as soon as the foundation was laid for the Peter and Paul Fortress, the future capital took on a new life in words, simultaneously ­celebrated in official odes and demonized in the legends and prophesies that accompanied its founding. (The resulting duality was reflected onomastically: in odes, Petersburg became a lofty Northern Palmyra or Venice of the North; in the common tongue, it remained, simply, Piter.) Petersburg was never merely a physical, historical space but also an imagined one, which took on “fictional” dimensions right from the start. These two opposing verbal forces that sang of Peter’s act (the odes commissioned from above and the underground tales from below) forged the narrative of the city’s founding, producing a bifurcated mythology that was both publicly declaimed and privately whispered. The city’s written chronicle was begun in the eighteenth century, and its earliest poetic records generally follow the generic and aesthetic conventions of that age.12 Beginning with Gavrilo Buzhinsky’s 1717 “Oration in Praise of St. Petersburg and Its Founder,” the era’s brightest luminaries—Vasilii T ­ rediakovsky, Lomonosov, Gavriil Derzhavin, Mikhail Murav’ev, Sumarokov, Konstantin Batiushkov—all contributed odes and lyrics to the new capital’s growing literary corpus.13 By the time Petr Viazemsky composed his own “Petersburg” in 1818, these poets had constructed a poetic monument to Peter and his creation that was as lofty and as gleaming as the Admiralty Spire. These verses cultivated a flattering image of the city, praising its maker and expressing a sense of awe before its miraculous conception. A single set of themes and motifs was repeated across these early works (Peter as creator and protector; Visions of Russian Rulers,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 99–100. 12 Julie A. Buckler contends that the eighteenth-century Petersburg literary tradition was a more eclectic phenomenon than previous scholars have allowed. See Mapping St. ­Petersburg, 72. 13 For more on the city’s eighteenth-century odic tradition, focusing on the era’s overlooked literary diversity, see ibid., 67–73.

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his miraculous creation of something out of nothing), establishing and reinforcing an “official” mythology of Petersburg. No sooner were these poets’ exalted words inscribed, however, than an alternative oral mythology began to bubble up beneath their written memorial, disrupting and destabilizing the officially s­ anctioned story of the city. While Peter’s miracle on the northern swamp was officially styled after Genesis, the popular response was patterned more after Revelation, and a promise of destruction loomed over the city from its very beginnings. Peter’s conservative first wife, Evdokiia Lopukhina, is said to have leveled the original curse at her husband’s newborn city: “May Petersburg be empty.” Her words would be recalled and repeated throughout the city’s history, particularly during times of famine, fire, and, especially, flood. Other prophets emerged in the early days of the capital, foretelling Petersburg’s imminent destruction by water; one mystic’s 1720 vision of the godless city swallowed up by the sea was so influential that inhabitants began to move to higher ground.14 According to such eschatological models of the city, chaos would eventually triumph over cosmos; the city would flood, sink, or otherwise end in emptiness, in ­accordance with Lopukhina’s curse (“Peterburgu byt’ pustu”), a rhetorical echo and negation of her husband’s originating “Zdes’ byt’ gorodu.” It is hardly surprising that the religious and superstitious Russian peasantry should have responded to the city with some degree of suspicion and hostility—after all, its origins were murky, steeped in mythology; it was an inorganic city that seemed to grow unnaturally fast; and then there was its inauspicious location: even though the city was represented as man’s victory over nature, a sharp tension between nature and city persisted. Built over a swamp, it is dominated by fog, rain, and periodic floods, which seemed to foreshadow the destruction of the artificial city, buttressing prophesies that Petersburg’s end would come at the hands of the elements. The city was thus strongly associated with both birth (creation, 14 For these and other legends and prophesies of Petersburg, see Sindalovskii, Legendy i mify, 15–16; and Vlasova, Tainy Severnoi stolitsy, 63–80. This prophetic tradition continued into the nineteenth century, when the artist-freemason I. I. Oleshkevich foretold both the flood of 1824 and the uprising on Senate Square, and the preacher Feodosii Levitskii later interpreted both events as signs of the apocalypse. See I. N. Bozherianov, Nevskii Prospekt (1703–1903): Kul’turnoistoricheskii ocherk dvukhvekovoi zhizni S.-Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1901–3), 2:375, in Vlasova, Tainy Severnoi stolitsy, 66.

Introduction

newness) and death (apocalypse, destruction, eschatology), hailed at once as a New Jerusalem and condemned as a second Babylon. Ultimately, the city’s mythos sprang from two sources: the establishment’s laudatory self-perception, as recorded and proclaimed by the city’s earliest bards; and the apprehensive popular response to what seemed an unnatural phenomenon.15 Every aspect of Petersburg that was praised by the poets was spurned, point by point, by the peasants. The marriage of these two literary lines—the city’s grand odic record and its murky, unofficial narratives—would feed and nourish a nascent poetic trend, eventually giving birth to an extraordinary new literature of the city. As many admirers of Peter’s city have noted, Petersburg is a city that loves to be written or verbally “authored,” whether in its underground oral narratives or in its official artistic ones. As Buckler puts it in the introduction to her work, the city practically wrote itself into being—it is “its own favorite literary subject.”16 And so, the new imperial capital of Russia quickly became its literary capital, too. Although the city boasts only a short history, it has nonetheless generated an extraordinarily rich literary and artistic tradition since the 1833 publication of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, widely acknowledged as the originating work of what has come to be known as the Petersburg Text, which will be the subject of the second part of this introduction. Implicit in this discussion runs a through line relating to polarity and contradiction: the city as a political monument to modernization vs. its susceptibility to mysticism and revelation; the reformer tsar’s grand ambition vs. the swampy ground he chose to build on; Peter as both God and Antichrist, his creation as consecrated and cursed. Certainly, Petersburg’s situation on the northwestern periphery of the territory marked it as fundamentally non-­ Russian, an unrooted, foreign city alienated from its native culture.17 Theorists of the city’s mythologization and the cultural and literary traditions surrounding it agree that Petersburg’s pervasive duality is rooted in the particular ­circumstances of its genesis. According to Vladimir Toporov, the city’s essential 15 As Buckler observes, “It is a Petersburg commonplace that mysterious legends and oral lore play an integral role in the imperial capital’s cultural life and convey an essential part of the city’s history” (Mapping St. Petersburg, 116). 16 Ibid., 1. 17 See Yuri M. Lotman, “The Symbolism of Petersburg,” in Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 191–202.

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polarity springs from the uneasy equivalence of nature and culture it embodies: “Petersburg as a great city is not the result of any victory or full triumph of culture over nature, but a place where the dual reign of nature and culture is embodied, enacted, realized.”18 Brodsky scholar Maija Könönen theorizes that this nature/culture opposition so strongly associated with the city stems from its extraordinary origins: it did not grow organically but according to the vision of Peter the Great.19 This classical nature/culture divide found reflection in its verbal representations: where poets praised the city as a triumph over nature, the peasantry condemned it as a crime against the natural order. Indeed, at the root of these theoretical explanations, I would argue, lies a linguistic source: Petersburg’s dualism springs from the opposition between the oral and written traditions that surrounded and conditioned the city’s image. It is the tension between the written word that extolled Peter’s creation (official, elegiac, encomiastic) and the spoken words that cursed and doomed it (underground, folksy, negative) that ultimately gave rise to both the city’s two-sided nature and to its extraordinary literary tradition. That is, while the city’s mythos undoubtedly stems from its unusual genesis, I would argue that it is the uniquely verbal nature of its derivation—its origin in the Word (Peter’s legendary “Let there be a city!”), as well as the subsequent written/oral divide in its literary monumentalization—that is the dominant factor in determining the form of its literary tradition. In a word, Petersburg was founded by the edict of Peter: his fabled proclamation and its literary representation inverted the divine fiat, upending the natural order and creating the conditions that allowed for the unnatural animation that occurs again and again in the subsequent literature of his city; one of the most recognizable features of the Petersburg literary tradition, this material ­animation is a direct result of the struggle over creative language and power in the city. Within a century of the city’s founding, Peter’s creative (and, to some, unholy) Word would be challenged on two fronts: from below, his ­identification with the Antichrist contested his representation as an earthly God; meanwhile, 18 V. N. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg: IskusstvoSPB, 2003), 35 (hereafter PTRL). 19 Maija Könönen, “Four Ways of Writing the City: St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2003), 18, http://ethesis. helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/slavi/vk/kononen/fourways.pdf.

Introduction

after the eulogistic odes of the eighteenth century had petered out, a new ­generation of writers, beginning with Pushkin, subjected the entire Petersburg project to critical reevaluation. These two waves of verbal challengers t­ hreatened Peter’s legacy on two levels: one sought to redefine him as an Idol, associating his act of genesis with the apocalypse, while the other sought to replace him, appropriating the creative word to become a rival force of verbal animation. The poets who took up the pen to challenge the tsar’s revolutionary undertaking committed acts of verbal creation to rival Peter’s in works that would eventually form the basis of a tradition largely devoted to understanding the city that was, itself, engendered in his word. Their texts feature humble members of ­Petersburg’s bureaucratic or military hierarchies who rise up to issue a ­challenge to the city’s political establishment, their confrontations encoding the authors’ own struggle over literary and political authority within an empire still ­dominated by Peter’s authoritarian spirit.

The Petersburg Text of Russian Literature: Toporov and After The so-called Petersburg Text is a heterogeneous collection of artistic works connected to the city of Petersburg, which has been theorized as a single, ­collective “text.” The term refers primarily to literary pieces but has also been extended to include works of musical, architectural, and visual art. Not just any work associated with the city can join this collective, however; while each representative chapter of the Petersburg Text is “about” Petersburg, not every piece related to Petersburg is considered part of this supertextual tradition. These texts compose a single, synthetic body, unified not only by common locus but by thematic, structural, and even lexical concerns, as each individual work appears to recycle plot points and even a tightly controlled set of v­ ocabulary from earlier works. Vladimir Toporov, the principal theoretician of the Petersburg tradition, details the deep correspondences among these i­ndependent texts, from the higher compositional and generic devices all the way down to the phonetic level, concluding that the city has its own language.20 And while many cities 20 Toporov, PTRL, 18–19; 22: “Petersburg has its own ‘language.’ It speaks to us through its streets, squares, waters, islands, gardens, buildings, monuments, people, history, and ideas, and may be understood as a sort of heterogeneous text, to which is ascribed a certain general

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might share a common sign system—in fact, it has become customary for cultural theorists to refer to an “urban semiotics,” construing all aspects of a given city’s environment, from the material to the linguistic—what makes Petersburg unique, in Toporov’s formulation, is the existence of a “synthetic supertext” that unifies and imposes a higher meaning.21 This cluster of works thus composes a geographically, thematically, and semantically unified “mastertext,” a single, synchronic text written by various authors and at various times in the city’s history. This mastertext exhibits strong intertextuality, as its component texts interact with one another, seeming to call out to each other across decades and even centuries. Although Toporov first introduced his concept of a semiotically unified “city text” in the early 1970s,22 the same body of works had received the critical attention of the literary scholar Nikolai Antsiferov a half-century earlier. A sort of spiritual godfather of the Petersburg Text, Antsiferov composed a series of influential studies in the 1920s probing for the myth and soul of Petersburg.23 His Dusha Peterburga (The Soul of Petersburg) is hardly an objective, scholarly treatment of the city’s literary tradition; it represents, rather, the author’s impassioned and personal ­investigation of the cultural mythologies surrounding his beloved city. The result—a lyrical portrait of an unpredictable, unfathomable, and living space, emphasizing its extraordinary artificial origins, as well as the integrity of its literary image across works and eras—prefigures and anticipates Toporov and his later theoretical model. meaning, and on the basis of which it is possible to reconstruct a particular system of signs that is realized in the text.” 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Toporov first introduced the notion of the Petersburg Text in his 1973 article “O strukture romana Dostoevskogo v sviazi s arkhaicheskimi skhemami mifologicheskogo myshleniia (Prestuplenie i nakazanie),” in Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture, ed. Jan Van der Eng and Grygar Mojmir (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 225–302; the construct was most famously developed in a series of articles by Toporov and his fellow structuralists in Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul’tury: Peterburg (Tartu: Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1984). For the most comprehensive representation of Toporov’s theory and praxis, see PTRL. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Toporov in the present study refer to this edition. See also V. N. Toporov, Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz: Issledovaniia v oblasti mifopoeticheskogo (Moscow: Progress-Kul’tura, 1995), which includes several articles not contained in the later volume. 23 N. P. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga: Peterburg Dostoevskogo. Byl’ i mif Peterburga, reprint of 1922, 1923, 1924 editions, ed. E. B. Pokrovskaia (Moscow: Kniga, 1991).

Introduction

The semiotician Toporov inherited Antsiferov’s mystical concept of the city and lent it a new “scientific,” or formalist, orientation. His exhaustive survey of Petersburg literature disclosed a set of oppositions—old/new, East/West, chaos/ cosmos—that repeatedly assert themselves through the various i­ ndividual works, integrating the tradition’s disparate authors and epochs into a cohesive whole.24 Toporov’s model was based, in part, on the deep ­correspondences across the ­individual works in Petersburg’s literary tradition. These affinities, he argued, stem from the “monolithic” character of what he identified as the city’s central idea: the attainment of spiritual purification through evil.25 In this formulation, the city (site of sin, suffering, and endings) offers its inhabitants a rocky path to moral salvation through the experience of evil; it is this possibility of spiritual rebirth that constitutes the unifying ­principle behind the city, drawing together the diverse texts of the Petersburg Text. Though scholars of the Petersburg Text disagree on whether the literary line came to an end along with the city’s imperial-era name,26 the tradition’s origins have never been in question: virtually all agree that the Text originated with Pushkin’s famous “Petersburg povest’” of 1833. As the final work in the city’s odic tradition, and the first to bring its underground mythos to poetic light, The Bronze Horseman provided a template for a brand new literature of the city that united its written and oral legacies; after its publication, a new tradition would unfold in the magnificent reverberations of its iambs. Gogol’s Petersburg 24 Toporov theorized the Petersburg Text as a system of binaries, arising spontaneously from the clash of nature and culture that generated the city and determined its fate. In Toporov’s analysis, the dualism characteristic of the Petersburg city text, variously manifested and expressed across its chapters, derives from the dialectic of creation and destruction that shaped the city’s essence—its miraculous origins versus the eschatological legends that accompanied its unnatural construction. This notion of a dual utopian/apocalyptic city was taken up by Lotman who, alongside Toporov, became the other father-theorizer of ­Petersburg’s unique literary tradition (see Universe of the Mind, 191–202). 25 Toporov, PTRL, 27: “the unity of the Petersburg text is determined not so much by the unity of the object of description as by its monolithic (that is, unified and whole), extreme semantic focus (the idea)—the path to moral salvation, to spiritual rebirth, under conditions where life perishes in a kingdom of death, and lies and evil triumph over truth and goodness.” 26 For more on the texts that constitute the Text, see Toporov, PTRL, 23–25; and Z. G. Mints, M. V. Bezrodnii, and A. A. Danilevskii, “‘Peterburgskii tekst’ i russkii simvolizm,” in Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul’tury, 81–82. For the evolution of the Petersburg theme in literature, see Toporov, PTRL, 22–28; and Könönen, “Four Ways,” 20–21.

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tales, written in the decade following The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades” (but already self-consciously developing and playing with themes introduced by Pushkin), are widely considered the other generating works of the Petersburg Text. If Pushkin and Gogol are the undisputed fathers of the tradition, Dostoevsky is its dutiful and ambitious son, very deliberately ­developing the themes and images laid out by his predecessors. By the early twentieth century, the Text had become entirely self-referential; in Petersburg, Bely presents a veritable encyclopedia of the tradition’s themes and motifs, with playful intertextual references to all the major works that preceded it. According to Toporov’s definition, the Petersburg Text is next sustained by the Symbolists and Acmeists before dying out in the 1920s, along with the toponym “Petersburg” itself; his strictly delimited construct stretches one century only, from Pushkin’s tragic The Bronze Horseman to the very literal tragedy of Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song.27 A number of scholars have treated this aspect of his formulation with skepticism, questioning why works written outside the hundred-year bounds drawn by Toporov but which otherwise fit his criteria for inclusion may not be considered part of the Text. As c­ ontemporary Pushkinist David Bethea asks, “If a given work is created after Vaginov’s ‘Goat Song’ (such as Bitov’s ‘Pushkin House’), does it mean that it can not enter into a constructive dialogue with the Petersburg text?”28 According to the philosopher G. L. Tul’chinsky, the Text did not die out in the 1930s: it survived, along with Leningrad, through the devastation and deprivations of the t­wentieth century until the great Soviet dissident poet Joseph Brodsky, who canonized the “Second Petersburg, the one made of verses and of Russian prose.”29 And according to still others, the text is alive even now, unfurling itself still in the newly rechristened city of St. Petersburg. In the decades since its introduction, the Petersburg Text construct has been variously embraced, elaborated, and thoroughly interrogated, most 27 Toporov, PTRL, 27. 28 David M. Bethea, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’: Peterburgskii tekst i mifopoeticheskoe myshlenie Pushkina,” in Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst?, ed. V. M. Markovich and V. Shmid [Wolf Schmid] (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2005), 173. 29 G. L. Tul’chinskii, “Gorod—ispytanie,” in Metafizika Peterburga: Peterburgskie chtenie po teorii, istorii i filosofii kul’tury 1, ed. Aleksandr Gogin et al. (St. Petersburg: Eidos, 1993), 146–47; Joseph Brodsky, “Guide to a Renamed City,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), 93.

Introduction

notably by Toporov himself along with other members of the Tartu-Moscow School of semiotics.30 In the years immediately following its introduction, the Petersburg Text came to be regarded as “one of the most enduring and i­ nfluential concepts in the history of Russian culture.”31 More recently, however, while Toporov’s classic essay is still thought to offer the most comprehensive s­ cholarly portrait of Peter’s city text and its associated mythology, the Text has begun to face far more serious challenges than its disputed end date, as scholars question the shape, description, and even the very validity of the model. According to Vladimir Markovich and Wolf Schmid, editors of an important recent collection of articles on the Petersburg Text, some scholars accept Toporov’s concept as self-evident or use it as point of departure for their own research; others analyze aspects of Petersburg literature without regard for the formulation; still others look to challenge or dismiss the concept ­altogether.32 Many of those who adopt the basic construct nonetheless question its limited scope. Some contemporary critics employ a more broadly semiotic concept of “text,” defining it as any meaning-bearing cultural phenomenon.33 Toporov’s original paradigm is thus stretched to encompass a more diverse corpus of phenomena, including ritual, architecture, topography—even the natural environment.34 For these critics, a once-rigid construct has become a more supple container, which effortlessly expands to include a wealth of cultural phenomena beyond the canonical literary works that are generally treated. More fundamentally, some members of this new generation of Petersburg scholars have begun to doubt the very legitimacy of the Petersburg Text, posing a series of questions that chip away at the monumental edifice constructed by Toporov: Has it been defined correctly? Are Toporov’s categories still relevant? Can a “supertext” really be posited from a 30 For a thorough introduction and inquiry into the Petersburg Text, see Mints et al., “‘Peterburgskii tekst’ i russkii simvolizm”; and V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i ‘Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury’ (Vvedenie v temu),” in PTRL. 31 V. M. Markovich and V. Shmid, editors’ introduction to Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst?, 3. 32 Ibid. 33 Könönen, “Four Ways,” 17. 34 In her comprehensive revision of the monumentalization of Petersburg, for instance, Julie Buckler provisionally accepts Toporov’s term but “expands its range of application” to include the work of half-forgotten, middling authors and artists, as well as guidebooks, reference works, and cultural histories. See Mapping St. Petersburg, 24.

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set of discrete texts?35 And most important, as Markovich and Schmid ask, does the Petersburg Text as such even exist? In Toporov’s structuralist model, Petersburg itself imposes the o­ verarching, integrating theme of salvation through evil onto the disparate pieces of its own eponymous city text. How much does this thematic superstructure, however, correspond to literary reality? As Markovich and Schmid point out, Toporov’s “monolithic” thematic characterizes only certain writings of the Text;36 indeed, the idea of spiritual salvation—the “dialectic of destruction and salvation” that serves as the key to Toporov’s Petersburg Text—is perfectly realized only in certain works of Dostoevsky.37 Alexander Dolinin observes that Toporov’s criteria, which correspond so beautifully to the works of Dostoevsky and his immediate successors, do not bear as clear a relationship to earlier and later parts of the Text;38 in other words, the theory appears to have been constructed around Dostoevsky, then cast retrospectively back over the tradition’s foundations. The very unity among the constituent texts—the basis for their ­theorization as a single Text in the first place—has likewise been probed: if Toporov’s big idea isn’t holding it together, is it still one Text? And if so, then what is holding it together? Perhaps, as Buckler suggests, these writers are simply ­transcribing the text dictated by the city: a narrative of foul weather, fog, extremes of dark/ light and cold/hot, and the resulting mental states of exhaustion, depression, alienation, and melancholy.39 Or perhaps it’s actually an intentional unity, not an organic and inadvertent one, as writers seek to inscribe themselves into the city’s written chronicle, alongside Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. In this interpretation, the symbolic, poetic dimensions of Petersburg are not so much 35 See I. Kalinin, “Peterburgskii tekst kak produkt teoreticheskoi mifologizatsii,” in Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst?, 24–25. 36 Markovich and Schmid, editors’ introduction to Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst?, 4. 37 As Schmid remarks, “It is inappropriate to attribute to the entire structure of the Petersburg text an idea of salvation drawn from the work of a single one of its representatives” (“Chto takoe ‘Peterburgskii tekst’?” in Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst?, 8–9). 38 “The basic model proposed by Toporov is completely applicable only to a limited number of texts—from Dostoevsky through the Symbolists—and is not entirely adequate for either the early Petersburg classics (Pushkin, Gogol) or Postsymbolist images of the city” (A. A. Dolinin, “Proza Nabokova i Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury,” in Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst?, 346). 39 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 18.

Introduction

organically passed from one writer to another as they are “slavishly ­reproduced”;40 the unity of the Petersburg Text is neither imposed by the city nor inspired by its origins but stems rather from its authors’ imitative—or revisionary— impulses. This notion of an intentional, premeditated unity would appear to exclude the mythic, organically unified Text of Toporov. Or perhaps, most prosaically, the thematic and atmospheric correspondences across the works are attributable not to anything unique to Petersburg but to general artistic trends at the time of the tradition’s inception. As Schmid asks, isn’t it possible that the unusual structural and thematic unity of the tradition did not arise from any mythic or atmospheric peculiarities of the city but reflect, rather, “Russian manifestations of pan-European stylistic patterns such as R ­ omanticism, freneticism, the Gothic novel, and Hoffmanism?”41 This notion would call into question the very idea of a central idea: if the early Text’s unity derives from generic homogeneity alone, then there is no need for the “monolithic aim” postulated by Toporov. Indeed, one set of ­theorists has interrogated the very uniqueness of Petersburg and its Text. In her work, Buckler sets out to challenge the myth of Petersburg’s distinctiveness, demonstrating that many of those phenomena typically associated with the imperial capital have their equivalents in London, Paris, and other cities. She goes on to confront the colossal textual structure proposed by Toporov and Iurii Lotman, treating the city instead as a complex, diverse body of texts, irreducible to a “single textual structure.”42 Where Buckler questions the ­existence of a distinctive Petersburg mastertext, Rolf Hellebust probes the uniqueness of its unifying principle. As he points out, the seemingly “sober semiotics” that led Toporov to posit a unifying myth of salvation at the heart of the Petersburg Text actually disguise a very Dostoevskian “cult of holy suffering”—the very myth, that is, that inspired “the whole nineteenth-century [Russian] literary canon.”43 My own analysis reassesses five of the most famous opening “chapters” of Toporov’s original study, and despite the vigorous and healthy reappraisal of Toporov’s structure in recent criticism, my own readings of these foundational works of the Petersburg tradition do bear out the existence of an integrated 40 Ibid., 17. 41 Schmid, “Chto takoe,” 11. 42 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 5. 43 Rolf Hellebust, “The Real St. Petersburg,” Russian Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 507.

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supertext, exhibiting narrative coherence and development even at the earliest stage—a defensible critical model and not just a scholarly convenience. But while my study adopts Toporov’s useful terminology, my readings offer an important corrective to his model: in basic terms, my work shifts the ­foundations of Toporov’s theory, revealing the linguistic origins of the Petersburg mythos and reinstating the creative Word as the basis and unifying principle of the Petersburg Text.44 Where Toporov ascribes the unity of the Text to the powerful, focalizing idea of spiritual purification (in the basic Toporovian “plot” of the Petersburg narrative, the hero must navigate the evil of Peter’s demonic capital in order to reach salvation), my work postulates an analogous plotline, which unfolds in the realm of language and power, rather than morality: the injustice inherent in Peter’s unnatural creation pushes the hero to verbally challenge and transcend the tsar’s new order to attain a rival power. By charting unfamiliar (or underexplored) subtexts of the well-known works that Toporov’s model has come to frame and, to a large extent, define, my readings result in an alternative to his “salvational” model, a return to the animating literary spirit of the city. My readings establish that the driving force behind the city’s literary ­tradition is the ongoing rivalry between creator and subject over language and power; the battle is waged on several fronts: poets/Peter, citizens/officials, literary heroes/authority figures. Material animation is only the most ­spectacular symptom of this larger verbal struggle—and, as we will see, the regular awakening of dead matter in the pages of Petersburg’s supertext is no mere echo of the city’s founding moment but rather a perpetual reenactment of this contest over the creative Word.45 If Toporov appears to cast 44 In fact, although Toporov’s Petersburg Text construct is essentially spiritual in orientation, its foundation must be understood as fundamentally linguistic in nature. The theorist himself initially minimized the role of oral tradition in the Text, relegating the categories of oral myth to a footnote of the PTRL essay (myths of origin, eschatology, etc., n. 59); in the later article “Petersburg texts and Petersburg myths” (1990), however, he acknowledges that urban legends and other artifacts of oral lore form a synthesized whole with literature: the oral and the textual are intimately bound as “two poles, the two outer limits of a single ‘supertheme’—‘Petersburg in language’ [Peterburg v slove]” (V. N. Toporov, “Peterburgskie teksty i Peterburgskie mify [zametki iz serii],” Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz, 369). 45 On their own, both ozhivlenie and the city’s verbal genesis constitute well-recognized features of the Petersburg tradition (as one astute reviewer notes, it would be difficult to teach these stories of galloping statues and overcoat-wives without pointing out the common theme of animation). What is new in my argument, however, is the explicit connection between the

Introduction

Dostoevsky and his spiritual preoccupations back over the tradition’s earliest chapters of the Petersburg Text, I set out to do the opposite: to revisit and closely reread the tradition’s early (pre-Dostoevskian) texts to discover how they interact and what shape they take on their own.46 These readings uncover a preoccupation with language—divine and profane, literary and bureaucratic—that will, in turn, shape the poetic vision of Dostoevsky and other subsequent contributors to the Petersburg tradition. The revelation of these underinvestigated subtexts highlights aspects of the texts that encode the authors’ (and their heroes’) explicitly linguistic challenge to Petersburg’s political and bureaucratic power structures.47 My readings’ close focus on language, textuality, and literariness requires a fuller explanation of the terms “Word” and “word”; I refer to both and endeavor to distinguish as clearly as possible between the two. The Word (with a capital W) is akin to God’s Logos, with which He called forth the cosmos in the Judeo-Christian creation myth. The Gospel of John opens with a famous hymn to the Word, employing the same metaphor of language to emphasize the connection between the central New Testament act of creation and the Old Testament story of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was literary “coming to life” and the creative Word that constitutes the originating force of the city—the living nose and the “Let there be.” 46 That is, while my study does not attempt to tear down or rebuild Toporov’s scaffolding (which offers a sturdy critical construct that stands quite well on its own), my detailed reinterpretation of the earliest chapters of the Petersburg Text and their dynamic intertextual interplay brings new dimension to it by substantially adjusting the scholarly perspective, foregrounding aspects of the tradition that had previously remained in shadow; rather than using the model to define the texts, I believe that my innovative rereadings shine a new light on the model itself. 47 If the steady stream of critical literature on Petersburg is any indication, the public interest in Russia’s cultural capital has not ebbed in the post-Toporov era. In the decade since the tercentennial celebration of the city’s founding, dozens of academic titles have been released, scrutinizing the city from every conceivable angle, from the study of its statuary and guidebooks to its role as the repository of Russia’s cultural memory. The most literary of these studies—to which my own therefore bears the strongest affinity—are Julie Buckler’s magisterial exploration of Petersburg’s “middle spaces,” both physical and textual (Mapping St. Petersburg), and Anna Lisa Crone and Jennifer Day’s inspired discovery of a fin de siècle trend of poetic identification with the space of the city (My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters [Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2004]). My own analyses, which return to the foundational texts of the nineteenth-century canon, are written in dialogue with these and other recent interpreters of the phenomenon of Petersburg.

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with God, and the Word was God. [. . .] And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”48 The Christian Logos is neither agent nor intermediary of God but God Himself; it finds embodiment first in the created world, then in Jesus Christ—inscribed once in light, and again in human flesh. Peter’s legendary fiat that organized Finnish chaos into a new Russian cosmos represents an i­mitation (or usurpation) of this originating Word: it is a creative, animating force, a principle of verbal generation. In decreeing this new military, bureaucratic, and economic capital, with its attendant new traditions, new aesthetic, and new Table of Ranks, Peter has, in effect, begotten an entire semiotic order: a network of agreed-on signs that create and express meaning, and within which each of his subjects occupies a particular position.49 This specific Petersburg semiotic includes all aspects of social and political life: military and bureaucratic (the grades and titles of the Table of Ranks), fashion (beaver collars, badges, beauty marks, and other signifiers of status), architecture and geography (the tension between the palaces of Peter’s parade grounds and the tenements of the outskirts), and language (the new literary language, so strongly associated with Peter and the developing culture of his new capital).50 As Peter’s (spoken, creative) Word hardened into (written, controlling) law, the tsar would become associated with both oral and written forms; the divine (or, in this case, ­pseudodivine) Word thus assumed social and political dimensions when pronounced—or penned—by the world-building tsar or the various P ­ etersburg authority figures that succeeded and patterned themselves after him. The other “word” (with a lower-case w) refers to human language, which does not typically aspire to divinity or its counterpart. Still, some speech acts 48 John 1:1; 1:14. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version. 49 I draw here on Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic order or, in psychoanalytic terms, a system of social and linguistic signs within which the mature subject must take up a position. While my readings are not based in psychoanalytic theory per se, I have found in the postFreudian framework of Lacan an invaluable resource for articulating a universal model of socio-sexual development, illuminating the power dynamics—sexual, linguistic, and social—at work in the pursuit of subjectivity and providing a lexicon uniquely suited to discussing themes of language and authority. I also employ the vocabulary of semiotic theory in order to discuss the generation and construction of meaning within the sign system of Peter’s city. 50 For more on the semiotics of the early city and its demands of strict conformity, see Lotman, Universe of the Mind, 200–202. On the topographical tensions within the city, see ibid., 199.

Introduction

are more powerful than others: so-called “performative” utterances do not describe but rather create; in them, speech and act become indivisible. I draw here on the tenets of speech act theory which, as articulated by J. L. Austin, focus on specific, highly ritualized forms of discourse such as naming or swearing an oath—in other words, verbal acts performed by particular people under specific circumstances to have a clear and immediate effect in the world.51 But while Austin expressly excludes literary language from his analysis, later scholars have employed the idea of performativity to describe the special capacity of literary discourse to call characters and ideas into being. While speech act theory does not constitute a primary interpretive framework for my readings, I use the term “performative” to refer to any language that creates new realities or establishes the authority of its speaker by effecting social, political, or material change in the societal or semiotic order.52 Such language is not divine, but it still constitutes a powerful force of creation and rebellion, whether poetic or political.

Logos: Peter’s Tool of State This section outlines some of the broad historical and cultural tendencies that would have influenced the earliest writers of the Petersburg Text. This ­discussion is not intended to offer an exhaustive cultural history of Russia or a comprehensive comparison of Eastern and Western aesthetics, but rather to delineate the cultural and religious landscape of post-Petrine Russia in order to ground the central argument historically and to shed light on the main concerns of the

51 Developed in the 1950s by British philosopher J. L. Austin and his American student, John Searle, speech act theory represents a major movement in the philosophy of language. Austin’s 1955 lectures were published posthumously in what has become the seminal text of speech-act theory, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Austin’s notion of performative language was taken up by later philosophers and theorists and has been elaborated in the critical lexicon of twentieth-century literary and cultural studies. 52 By “authority,” I refer to a character’s verbal agency, the power to articulate and dictate one’s reality. I explore this notion of authority on two levels: the textual (examining how certain characters, such as the He of The Bronze Horseman, control others) and the socio-literary (exploring how authors of the Petersburg Text gain agency by writing their subjugated heroes).

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book: the notion of literary language and its shifting relationship to power in the context of Petersburg. The Western philosophical tradition is conventionally conceived as arising from the abstracting capacity of language, with the logos serving as an ­atomizing instrument, capable of carving up reality and extracting truth.53 Consequently, Western society retains a deeply rooted, logocentric preference for the written or spoken word over sensory modes of comprehending the world.54 In the Orthodox world, by contrast, the logos was not understood as a disembodied force, a privileged means of apprehending and conveying truth; rather, various forms of expression—words, sounds, images—worked in concert, equally valued as legitimate means of accessing and glorifying the divine.55 The icon is the material equivalent of the word of scripture, constituting an entire “theology in images”;56 this extraordinary visuo-verbal correspondence results in the semiotic coincidence of speech and image, a 53 Dennis J. Schmidt, Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 20. 54 Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 23. The condition and consequences of logocentrism have been set forth most thoroughly in “Of Grammatology,” Jacques Derrida’s famous deconstruction of Western metaphysics, which charges that the entire philosophical tradition is grounded in and ­determined by the logos (A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 34–58). 55 As Tatiana Vladyshevskaia points out, all the arts of Medieval Rus’—bell ringing and ecclesiastical music, ikonopisanie, and literature—possessed an unusual harmony and equivalence of expression, merging together to communicate “a single content through different means” (“On the Links between Music and Icon Painting in Medieval Rus,” in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, ed. William C. Brumfield and Milos Velimirovic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 14). Anderson and Debreczeny point out that this integration of the aural and the visual—the fact that, say, Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity could “replicate and reinforce” the complicated theological notions expressed in the liturgy—proved useful in a religious society in which the vast majority of worshipers remained illiterate (Roger B. Anderson and Paul Debreczeny, eds., Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994], 2). 56 Leonide Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978), 10. The purported parity between verbal logos and painted likeness might be expected in a culture that reveres the icon—a sacred object that frequently blends text and image to establish contact between the beholder and the divine. Orthodox theology is rooted in the very indivisibility of word and image, Gospel and icon; St. Basil the Great proclaimed that “What the word transmits through the ear, that painting silently shows through the image,” and the Eastern Church continued to attribute the same liturgical and pedagogical value to the icon as it did to Holy Scripture for centuries to come (quoted in Leonide Ouspensky and

Introduction

sensory accord constituting a singular, unified message. This schema—the West’s spiritual and intellectual orientation toward the word, the East’s toward the icon—is, of course, an o­ versimplification; as many scholars of visual culture have detailed, the relative status of painting vs. poetry has evolved since the “invention of Logos” in the age of antiquity.57 Nonetheless, these broad cultural tendencies in the relationship between the visual and the verbal sign articulate an important distinction between Western and Eastern ­Christian attitudes toward representation and artistry.58 The privileging of verbal over visual in Western Christian society naturally had repercussions in scholastic traditions and cultural attitudes toward verbal expression. Although there was certainly no notion of artistic creation in the modern sense—no Romantic cult of imagination and self-expression—the art of rhetoric was thought to provide a framework within which the inventive manipulation of form and trope became possible; once a student had mastered the patterns and rules, he would attain “a greater range, and hence greater freedom of expression.”59 While the qualities most commonly associated with the modern figure of the poet (imagination, inspiration) would emerge fully Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982], 30). 57 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 9. A brief survey of the shifting relationship between word and image in the Western world provides a valuable counterpoint to the example of the Orthodox East; for an excellent summary of the status of visuality at various points in Western cultural history, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics Part I,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951): 496–527; Maria Rubins, Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 22–25; and Stafford, Good Looking, 3–40. 58 There is a growing body of critical literature on the complex relationship between image and word, and the relative power ascribed to each in various cultures or historical periods. See in particular W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Stafford, Body Criticism and Good Looking; and Antonella Braida and Giuliana Pieri, eds., Image and Word: Reflections of Art and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). For explorations of the verbal/visual divide in Russian culture, see Brumfield and Velimirovic, Christianity and the Arts in Russia; Anderson and ­Debreczeny, Russian Narrative and Visual Art; and Rubins, Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures. 59 Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984), 9; see also Larry Shiner, who clarifies that “‘invention,’ a term derived from classical rhetoric, [. . .] did not mean ‘creation’ in the modern sense but the discovery, selection, and arrangement of content” (The Invention of Art: A Cultural History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 46).

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only in the Renaissance,60 the philologically rich terrain of the West—the privileging of the legible over the visible, the veneration of the logos, the curricular focus on grammar and rhetoric—began to bear fruit even earlier: Dante’s Divine Comedy, the modern era’s first great work of vernacular poetry, appeared early in the fourteenth century. By the extraordinary cultural efflorescence of the Italian Renaissance, European belles lettres, though planted in the sacred soil of Western Christianity, were still deeply rooted in Classical form and philosophy, and their literary branches brought forth works that were increasingly secular in substance, vernacular in voice. In contrast, the culture of early Rus’ grew out of the rhetorical traditions of Byzantium, which “did not facilitate either the development of rhetoric as a scholarly discipline or the creation of textbooks for its study in the East Slav context.”61 The potential perils of secular learning and art—the pursuit of which was understood to threaten the supremacy of scripture—constitute a recurring motif in Russian thought.62 Boris Uspensky’s fascinating analysis of the Orthodox clergy’s opposition to the study of grammar and rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries concludes that the hostility was prompted in part by the desire to resist Western influence and, more fundamentally, by “the perception of grammar as a tool by which language could be manipulated, thereby making it possible for man not only to distort the meaning of sacred

60 Shiner, Invention of Art, 46. 61 Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 250. Pamela Davidson emphasizes that, in the West, classical texts (in Latin translation) were smoothly incorporated into the Christian theological curriculum, whereas in Rus’, “There was no debate over classical learning because there was no classical learning to debate” (Simon Franklin, “Echoes of Byzantine Elite Culture in Twelfth-Century Russia?,” in Byzantium and Europe: First International Byzantine Conference, ed. A. Markopoulos [Athens: European Cultural Center of Delphi, 1987], 184, quoted in Davidson, “Divine Service or Idol Worship? Russian Views of Art as Demonic,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 139). 62 For more on this historical context, see Davidson, “Divine Service,” 138–44. It is worth noting here that Russian literacy rates lagged behind those of the West through the nineteenth century, in large part due to the Orthodox mentality, which featured a “distrust of knowledge and argumentation, a denial of the role of reason in faith” (Boris N. Mironov, “The Development of Literacy in Russia and the USSR from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 2 [1991]: 247–48). This link between an opposition to formal education and Orthodoxy is borne out by the literacy rates in Russia versus non-Orthodox regions of the Russian Empire, such as the Baltic States (248).

Introduction

texts, but also, eventually, to become the author of his own texts.”63 Book learning, in other words, undermined the authority of Holy Scripture by encouraging individual verbal creation. The Orthodox liturgy teaches that God himself is “the one true artist-­ creator”; the job of the Russian artist or poet, therefore, was not to create but to bear forth and glorify His Word.64 The ideology of Orthodoxy fostered a marked passivity toward the divine Logos and, by extension, “the artistic use of the word.”65 Within this worldview, literary invention becomes a particularly fraught endeavor: in the act of poetic production, man usurps the role of the divine Creator and risks losing sight of his “subordinate position in [the] vertical hierarchy” of Maker and mortal.66 The task of the Orthodox artist, then, was limited to the faithful “reproduction” of divine songs and images, wiped clean of any hint of self-expression or invention; unlike the art of rhetoric, icon painting is based on examples rather than rules.67 The anticreative tendencies in Russian culture were all the more striking as they reached their zenith in the sixteenth century, just as the creative eruptions of the Italian Renaissance were transforming the landscape of European letters.68 The true secularization of Russian culture, in contradistinction to the model set by the West, began in earnest only in the late seventeenth century and 63 Davidson, “Divine Service,” 140. School and science were both regarded as “Western” threats to Russian culture; the teaching of Latin was likewise prohibited as heretical until the eighteenth century (Mironov, “Development of Literacy,” 248). 64 Adam Weiner, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 39; Iu. M. Lotman, “Russkaia literatura poslepetrovskoi epokhi i khristianskaia traditsiia,” in Izbrannye stat’i, 3:127. 65 Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 38. 66 Davidson, “Divine Service,” 131. For wonderful discussions of Russian views of literary creation as “intrinsically demonic,” see Davidson, “Divine Service,” 138–47; and Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 37–48. 67 According to a decision at the Stoglav Council of Moscow (1551), the ikonopisets was required to paint according to ancient exemplars, rather than the dictates of his imagination; innovation was, in fact, impossible, as modifying an icon was considered a heresy akin to the “willful alteration of ecclesiastical dogma” (Ernst Benz, Eastern Orthodox Church: Its Thought and Life [Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963], 8). As Ouspensky explains, icon painters were expected to imitate rather than create, for “To paint icons as they were painted by the ancient and holy iconographers means to follow Tradition and denotes a particular attitude towards sacred art” (Theology of the Icon, 13). 68 On the “virtual elimination of secular culture in the course of the sixteenth century,” see James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Knopf, 1966), 69.

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was impelled from above, through official edicts promoting ecclesiastical and civic reform. This late-arriving Russian enlightenment was marked by a decisive sense of schism (raskol) between the same forces that would later define the conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: sacred/secular, medieval/ modern, Muscovite/Western. In many ways, Peter’s reign brought to fruition these transitions that had already taken root in semireceptive Russian soil;69 nonetheless, the nation’s abrupt, decisive turn toward Western-style secular rationalism and the violent collision of orthodox and secular culture would be indissolubly associated with the Petrine revolution. Peter’s early eighteenth-­ century project of reform is often cast in terms of rupture, whether ideological, political, social, or cultural; underlying these clashes, however, was a simpler and more fundamental change: at their very root, Peter’s edicts radically ­reoriented Russian culture away from the icon and toward the logos; more specifically, the reformer-tsar violently severed the unity of word and image catechized by the Orthodox Church, repressing the veneration of one and promoting the other in the service of the new Russian state. The true raskol, in other words, was the one Peter hacked between icon and logos. On the ecclesiastical front, Peter quickly asserted state control over the Church, including its icon painters.70 In 1721, the tsar dissolved the autonomy of the Church by replacing the Moscow Patriarchate with a Holy Synod in St. Petersburg, effectively reducing it to “a department of the state.”71 According to Jefferson Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield, “Peter was personally uncomfortable with some Orthodox practices, especially the cult of icons,” and his Synod was tasked with the close regulation of their painting and veneration.72 He limited the number of icons allowed aboard the ships of his naval fleet, and he ­confiscated and investigated any privately held miraculous icons (on the dubious legal grounds that miracles falsely attributed to holy icons might provide the enemies of Orthodoxy with ammunition).73 Several of Peter’s 69 Davidson, “Divine Service,” 142. 70 For a summary and examples of this process, see James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971); and Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas M. Greenfield, Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (University Park: ­Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 30–33. 71 Gatrall and Greenfield, Alter Icons, 12. 72 Ibid., 33. 73 Ibid., 33; Cracraft, Church Reform, 212.

Introduction

rulings more or less directly subordinated icon to word, including a 1723 mandate that worshipers refrain from kissing icons during church services, confining themselves to reciting prayers and singing hymns.74 This reconfigured authority of holy image and word was then directed toward the interests of the state: Peter himself appointed a “superintendent” of ikonopistsy, answerable to the Synod, to ensure that the icons were painted “in accordance with ­ecclesiastical customs”; within weeks, this new appointee charged his painters with producing portraits of the tsar and his consort “‘by studying the world of the [Western European] masters.’”75 The tsar’s main ally in reform, Feofan Prokopovich, composed a Primer (first printed in 1720 and reprinted no fewer than twelve times over the next four years), which consisted, among other things, of a moral justification for Peter’s ecclesiastical reform; a description of the new hierarchy of power, culminating in the tsar, just beneath God; ­devotional commentary on the Lord’s Prayer (including the helpful reminder to “Grant health and long life to our Most Blessed Sovereign Peter the Great, Emperor and All-Russian Autocrat”); and a condemnation of the “true worship” of icons, along with other “superstitions.”76 Meanwhile, although the Petrine era is not known for its literary output, Peter’s reign marks a turning point in Russia’s relationship to the creative word, both official and artistic. Peter’s radical reform agenda, directed toward the formation of a powerful state and military, necessitated a corresponding ­revolution in letters, and the creation of a modern Russian literary language became a major priority of the Petrine era.77 James Cracraft identifies two primary stages of language reform in Petrine-era Russia: the enactment of a print revolution, a precondition for the establishment and dissemination of the new national language; and the promotion of plain, comprehensible, secular 74 Cracraft, Church Reform, 213. 75 Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii s 1649 goda, 6, no. 4079 (762–63) and 7, no. 4148 (16–17), quoted in ibid., 212–13. Meanwhile, the embattled church was seeking to “retain power over Orthodox devotion through icons” by endeavoring to restrict the surge of “heretical prints” flooding in from the West (Gatrall and Greenfield, Alter Icons, 31); the icon, in other words, was embattled from above and below. 76 Cracraft, Church Reform, 279–87. 77 For a comprehensive summary of the “language question” and its various responses in the Petrine era, see James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 256–300; and Cracraft, Revolution of Peter the Great, 96–106.

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Russian language. The need to translate technical manuals on navigation and shipbuilding from various European languages led to an explosive increase in lexicon: in an unparalleled instance of language change, over five thousand new words entered Russian in the thirty years between 1695 and 1725.78 Peter demanded a straightforward vernacular style, accessible to all military and naval personnel, diplomats, bureaucrats, scientists, and scholars: new loan words replaced obscure Slavonicisms, grammatical forms were simplified, and spelling and punctuation were standardized in accordance with European norms.79 But the most fundamental aspect of Peter’s ambitious project of linguistic reform lay at the alphabetic level. By the seventeenth century, the formal uncial (all capital letters) of Church Slavic had given way to the semicursive script of scribes, full of ligatures, diacritics, and stress marks. Peter devised a new, ­simplified alphabet that dropped nine letters and radically refashioned the rest on contemporary European models. All secular documents, from technical manuals to government pamphlets, were printed in this new “civil script,” while traditional Church Slavonic forms were reserved for sacred texts. This s­implified and standardized typeface helped to advance “the ­ambitious publishing program necessitated by [Peter’s] aggressive military, naval, and related educational projects,”80 all the while asserting a clear-cut visual distinction between the written cultures of Orthodox Muscovy and the secular Russian state.81 During Peter’s reign, Russia was beginning to play catch-up with Europe, ­catapulting directly from a sacred medieval tsardom into a modern empire. The delayed intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural values of both Renaissance and ­Enlightenment—the rediscovery of classical writings and ideas, a revitalized ­relationship to art and learning, the expansion of scholarship—seemed to tumble through Peter’s window all at once. Peter’s civic and church reforms led to a shift away from the holy, readying the ground for the seeds of a secular literary culture 78 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution, 283. 79 For specific examples of linguistic reforms under Peter—simplifications in morphology and syntax that led to the replacement of a bookish “high Slavonic” with a plain Russian style— see Viktor Zhivov, Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia, trans. Marcus C. Levitt (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 65–83. 80 Ibid., 102. 81 For a detailed account of Peter’s orthographic reforms see ibid., 53–65; and Cracraft, Petrine Revolution, 257–76.

Introduction

that would reach full blossom in the Golden Age of the ­nineteenth century.82 This was not an overnight change in any sphere: the processes that Peter set in motion— of secularization, westernization, and the growth of rationalism—were protracted and contentious, leading to the uneasy coexistence of—and occasional unlikely syntheses between—old and new over the course of the eighteenth century. While Peter’s plain style gradually stabilized over the course of the century into what would become the modern Russian literary language, there existed, as Marcus Levitt demonstrates, a “distinct rapprochement between ­ecclesiastical and secular culture during the fifty-year period from the mid 1740’s through the 1790’s,” exemplified in the nascent vernacular literary language.83 Indeed, Zhivov’s review of the language of the period shows a conscious attempt to integrate older religious forms into the new secular culture.84 Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that, as Levitt argues, visual culture and the ­privileging of vision continued to play a key role in the Russian enlightenment of the eighteenth century.85 As architectural historian Grigorii Kaganov writes, even by the late eighteenth century, “visual values predominated [. . .] The dignity of letters was defined by their capacity to draw pictures.”86 The ­centuries-long reign of the image in Russia would finally come to an end in the early 1800s: as nonreligious, artistic prose ascended to a prominent position in the cultural life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,87 and the visual element was concurrently devalued, the traditional relationship between word and icon was finally upended. As Levitt summarizes, in the nineteenth century “the literary text took precedence over the visual and the aural. 82 For a fuller account of the development of verbal and intellectual culture under Peter, including the establishment of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, see Cracraft, Petrine Revolution, 219–55. 83 Ibid., 270, 273. The construction and promotion of this new vernacular was achieved “with the publication of Russian grammar books and dictionaries and the creation of a Russian literary canon—activities that also began under Peter” (Cracraft, Revolution, 104). 84 See Zhivov, Language and Culture, 171–209. 85 Marcus C. Levitt, The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 3–4. 86 G. Z. Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts, trans. Sidney Monas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 51. 87 Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 45. For a theoretically informed account of the increased preoccupation with the Logos in Russia’s modern era (beginning in the 1860s), see Thomas Seifrid, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 1–52.

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The divinization of the Word—logocentrism—displaced the visual dominant”; this so-called “anti-ocularcentrism” can only be properly understood as a “profound dialectical negation of the preceding culture configuration.”88 Peter had originally seized the word for his own purposes, liberating a new, secular language from the rigid orthographic peaks and grammatical confines of Church Slavonic, then putting it to work in service of the state. Once these accommodating new letters had been shaken free from the strictures of Orthodoxy and pressed into official service, they were utilized for the ­ ­glorification of their liberator: in 1721, Peter was bestowed the never-beforeused title “Father of the Fatherland, All-Russian Emperor, Peter the Great,” a series of appellations that elevated the tsar as close to God as possible—a rhetorical deification that echoed throughout the century in eulogies and odes by poets like Antiokh Kantemir, Lomonosov, and Derzhavin.89 It should come as no surprise, then, that the 1703 creation of Petersburg—the inaugural act of the Petersburg period of Russian history—was cast as an act of verbal creation, both in folk mythology and in poetry; take for example Petr Chaadaev’s vision of the tsar writing the new society into existence: “All Peter the Great found at home was a sheet of white paper.”90 Peter’s legendarily oral creation of his capital 88 Levitt, Visual Dominant, 266, 6. Kaganov agrees that “toward the 1840’s, the former visual values had suffered such a profound devaluation that inhabited space came to be organized by other, nonvisual criteria” (Images of Space, 104). In a recent study, Luba Golburt notes a lingering emphasis on visuality in early nineteenth-century Russian culture, specifically relating to evocations of the past (see The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014], 164–79; 315n20). As she argues, the Russian historical novel was modeled on Walter Scott’s spectacular recreations of history. Pushkin “complicates” the model, moving away from the “hyper-­ ornamentation” of Scott’s vision toward a prose remarkable for its simplicity, artlessness, and consciousness of its status as literature (The Captain’s Daughter, for instance, is presented in the form of a memoir) (197). Rather than re-present visual details of the past, he touches on familiar moments, allowing his reader to recognize them; he employs visuality to recall an earlier era—one dominated by the image—but acts as a bridge between that earlier culture and a new one, dominated by word and rationality. 89 For a list of poetic treatments of the deified Peter, see Platt, “Antichrist Enthroned,” 102; 121n46, 47; and Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 67–68. Of course, the worship of a deified monarch was a tradition that stretched back to antiquity, and it would continue in the new Russian empire following Peter’s death; for an excellent treatment of the eighteenth-­ century’s panegyrical project of elevating its empresses into goddesses, see Golburt, First Epoch, 30–71. 90 P. Ia. Chaadaev, “Apologiia sumasshedshego,” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), 143, in Platt, “Antichrist Enthroned,” 98.

Introduction

does not, of course, make his power primarily a verbal one; the ­mythologization of his act, however, made such pointedly verbal authority into a central feature of the texts that it begat. As figured by whisperer and wordsmith alike, Peter’s performative Word, which called forth a city and launched a new era of Russian history, was modeled on the original creative Word; just as the divine Logos was instantiated in God’s creation, so was Peter’s “Let there be” instantiated in the miraculous city of Petersburg. In a fundamental way, then, in both popular consciousness and artistic consensus, Petersburg is the Logos: the material manifestation and embodiment of a deified tsar’s newly powerful Word. Remnants of this originating Logos would linger on in the city, bestowing an unusual authority not only on words themselves but on elements of ­Petersburg’s semiotic system: names, titles, ranks, and other bits of the city’s power-granting structures and hierarchies.

Confrontation: Wielding the New Literary Word Over the course of the eighteenth century, and particularly at the start of the nineteenth, the power of the poetic word passed from Peter to subject. What had been intended for the advancement of state goals—and for the elevation of the tsar himself—now moved beyond official control; throughout the e­ ighteenth century, as the new Russian vernacular slowly took root and disentangled itself from the grammatical and orthographical snarls of Church Slavonic, literary culture was still limited by genre dictates, the patronage system, and the court-centeredness of subject matter. By the first decades of the following century, however, the consequences of Peter’s reforms—including a surge in educational opportunities, the explosion of the literary market, and the expansion of the periodical press—extended access to the new literary language to all educated subjects, whose intellectual ambitions now surpassed the limited dominion and circumscribed purpose of the state. These years saw the ­extraordinary growth of poetry and prose fiction that were as inventive and experimental as the previous century’s had been conventional: it was hybrid in form and self-consciously literary, often with an ironic or critical stance; it was socially and politically engaged; and in the most striking departure from the hyperbolic paeans of the past, literature became a site of social engagement, critique, and occasional rebellion, with lines that encoded hostility or disdain

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toward the authorities. Pushkin’s ambivalent portrait of Peter in The Bronze Horseman, the first poetic inscription of the dark side of the Petrine legacy, represents the era’s original instance of “counter-logos”: the poetic word, first seized from the Church and harnessed by the tsar, could now be used to indict him for his deific ambitions. It is only fitting that the first truly creative acts of Russian literature should be committed in Petersburg—that in the period inaugurated by Peter’s verbal decree, writers would have to confront and entertain all sorts of questions about the power of language to create and control. In the traditional Orthodox consciousness, as we have seen, the act of artistic creation constitutes a bald arrogation of the true Creator’s role—indeed, Pushkin specifically links Peter’s creative impulses, exemplified in his faux-sacred fiat, with a presumptuous sort of demonism.91 Literary creativity, simultaneously instilled with God-likeness and fraught with demonic peril, is thus naturally associated with the Petersburg period of Russian literature; it is no surprise that the early authors of P ­ etersburg, a city whose very naissance constituted the foundational act of a new empire, should have been compelled to engage, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the creative—and destructive—potential of the word.92 Only in this new literary age could Derzhavin dare compose the ode “God” (Bog, 1784), in which the poetic act parallels divine creation; and while the poet credits God’s reflection in him (“like the sun in a droplet of water”) for his own artistic feats, his assured identification with the divine (Ia tsar’—ia rab—ia cherv’—ia Bog!) borders on the heretical.93 By the final stanzas, the poet is awestruck by his own 91 See Davidson, “Divine Service,” 144–47. As we have seen, this literary profanation is consistent with the historical reception of the tsar, whose rhetorical deification found equal reflection in his demonization: in addition to his heretical church, calendrical, and linguistic reforms, many of Peter’s personal characteristics—his monstrous size, his foreign clothing, the murder of his son—and official acts—his cutting of beards, his subordination of the Church, his drunken festivals—all confirmed his status as the Antichrist among Old Believers. As Vera Proskurina writes, “The exaltation of the tsar-emperor in a forcibly secularized country, where Christian and pagan elements of culture were still intermingled led, on one hand, to the emergence of a cult of Peter as the near equal of God and on the other, by contrast, to the perception of him as the Antichrist (Mify imperii: Literatura i vlast’ v epokhu Ekateriny II [Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006]). 92 In Weiner’s words, Peter’s creation of the new capital was the “first great artistic act of the Petersburg period” (By Authors Possessed, 46). 93 G. R. Derzhavin, “Bog,” http://rvb.ru/18vek/derzhavin/01text/021.htm. As Weiner writes, the audacity of the poem’s central metaphor would doubtless have impressed Russians of

Introduction

ability to capture and represent the majesty of his divine subject, inspiring his famous image of the poet as slave, tsar, worm, and God, all in one; this line may be read as the extraordinary synthesis of two verbal eras: the imitative, ­artistically passive age before Peter’s logos, and the innovative post-Petrine creative age, in which the poet’s achievements elevate rather than corrupt. As Petersburg authors commenced their exploration of the logos—the new artistic authority of the creative word—their ambitions advanced beyond the simple exaltation of the tsar: they began to tread where they wouldn’t have dared a century earlier (the Bronze Horseman is revealed as an idol; a few years later, the same statue loses its tail in Gogol’s “The Overcoat”), and their characters, such as Germann and Kovalev, aspired to positions they hadn’t earned. Such insolence and self-promotion were hardly what Peter had intended; the passage of the literary word from tsar to subjects (and the subsequent elevation of poet to God and imagined descent of Peter to earth) led to the sense of the creature turning on its creator. Preserved in the poetic compositions of Pushkin and Gogol, the primary architects of what would become the Petersburg Text, we discover a range of creative responses to Peter’s verbal legacy. First, and most fundamentally, these two writers revel in the great power of their poetic word. Whether in Pushkin’s spare, distilled prose or Gogol’s narrative excesses and hyperverbality, both authors take evident pleasure in the flexibility and agility of the newly ­unfettered Russian literary word. At the same time, the repeated pattern of verbal creation and punishment in their works intimates a darker side to this artistry: the authors’ self-chastening for daring to wield the creative word in the first place— the persistence of death, madness, and failure along these Petersburg heroes’ paths toward linguistic autonomy inscribes the authors’ own anxieties over the assumption of logos in a tradition within which artistic originality is equated with the demonic. Essentially, these authors are doing just what Peter did: animating with words. Their strange creations, however, betray a suspicion of literary language and its ability not only to create but to create the wrong thing. In the literature of the city, there is a sense that the historically incongruous (and inappropriate) ascendance of the Word in Peter’s new order—stemming pre-Enlightenment centuries as smacking of blasphemy” (By Authors Possessed, 45); cf. Davidson, “Divine Service,” 133.

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from the city’s miraculous origins and the westernizing tsar’s un-Orthodox promotion of word above icon—has resulted in an unusual accretion of verbal authority in the city: the logos has been afforded too much power. In many of the earliest chapters of the Petersburg Text, this metaphorical excess of linguistic potential leads to instances of “unnatural” creation, in which bits of material reality spring into life (in crass imitation of their miraculous birthplace). This peculiarly Petersburgian variety of animation—in which phenomena as diverse as city streets, statues, and snouts come alive—owes something to the u­ nnatural genesis of the city, whose creation was perceived as an unholy travesty of Genesis; accordingly, the wrong things—base or disgusting matter—are consistently brought into existence just as lesser beings begin to wield the divine power of language. A second, more subtle critique of the post-Petrine rise of language may be seen in the two authors’ attempts to restore the balance of word and image: a number of Petersburg works attempt to limit the untoward status of language by reintegrating icon and word or reinstating the visual element.94 (Perhaps this integration of word and image on the textual level represents a natural e­ xtension of these writers’ artistic impulses—both were, after all, also renowned for their visual artistry: Pushkin for the pen-and-ink portraits populating the margins of his notebooks, and Gogol for the detailed illustrations he incorporated into his manuscripts.) The Bronze Horseman, for instance, opens in a landscape untouched by the Petrine logos: a fishing boat streams along a wide river, its sodden banks dotted with huts, while misty woods rustle all around—this is a world of elemental unity and sensual harmony. Peter—or rather, an unnamed He—briefly surveys this land, then speaks his Word, and instantly (in the context of the poem, at least) this realm of bogs and fog is replaced by one of boundaries and partitions: palaces rise from reclaimed ground; bridges arc over water; channels are carved into the land and lined in granite. Peter’s glorious new city, presented in visual terms—all gold, light, and brilliance—is 94 I am certainly not the first scholar to notice the “logophobic” tendencies in post-Petrine art, which belie the celebrated logocentrism that is thought to characterize modern Russian literature. For a fascinating recent discussion of the deep current of “verbal skepticism” running through the Russian cultural landscape—a philosophical and theological recognition of the limitations of the logos and a preference for expressing the inexpressible—see Sofya Khagi, Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry (Evanston, IL: Northwestern ­University Press, 2013), 3–39.

Introduction

n­ onetheless a verbal creation, not only in its faux-miraculous origins, but in its self-consciously literary presentation by a poet who composes his paean to the city in the “moonless glow” of its White Nights. This lustrous visuality, so appropriate to the eighteenth-century ode, fades to a late November gloom as the story shifts to Evgenii’s nineteenth-century tragedy. The darkened city is presided over by the Bronze Horseman, a sort of visual preservation of Peter’s verbal feat: the horse of the reformer-tsar, whose outstretched arm points west, rears up on a pedestal carved from the Thunderstone (Grom-kamen’), a boulder from the Karelian forest from which the young tsar was said to have surveyed the location for his great capital. This is Peter at the moment that he created the dazzling city now encircling his pedestal. The poem records the confrontation between a young clerk whose words carry enough rebellious energy to awaken bronze, and the Horseman who, momentarily reanimated, lumbers down to chase his young challenger back into silence. Following this verbal showdown, the poem concludes on a small, barren island, on which a poor fisherman cooks his catch and on whose desolate shores a hut has washed up. Pushkin has returned us, that is, to a time before the decisive assertion of Peter’s ambitions. The poem closes on an image of unity between water and land, man and nature, life and death, in a landscape untouched by Peter’s civilizing project; the scene implies a primordial wholeness, with Peter’s logos unuttered and balance restored. Gogol’s Petersburg oeuvre moves a step closer to restoring the lost balance of visual and verbal in Peter’s empire.95 Several stories written during the author’s Petersburg period incorporate Orthodox iconography, either explicitly (as in the icons painted by the village blacksmith Vakula in “Christmas Eve” and the sinful portraitist who redeems himself as an icon painter in “The Portrait”) or implicitly (as when The Inspector General culminates in a mock tableau of the 95 The importance of the visual arts in Gogol’s narrative fiction has been well established in the critical literature: Vissarion Belinsky famously praised Gogol’s ability to “think in images” (myshlenie v obrazakh), Bely referred to Gogol as a painter, and Lotman commented on the influence of visuality in Gogol’s “artistic space” (all in Judith L. Robey, “Pictorial Language in the Works of N. V. Gogol: Metaphor, Tableau, Intertext” [PhD diss., Indiana University, 1991], 19). Robey points to Gogol’s early aspirations of becoming a painter (including an abortive stint at the Academy of Art), his knowledge of the Western artistic tradition and promotion of contemporary artists, and his incorporation of his own drawings into his manuscripts as biographical bases of his aesthetic orientation (“Pictorial Language,” 2–3).

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Last Judgment). Though not as explicitly, “Nevsky Prospect,” the inaugural story in the so-called Petersburg tales, also incorporates Orthodox ­iconography, revealing both its hostility to narrative and its comparably demonic dynamism in the post-Petrine landscape (discussed in depth in chapter 3). Gogol’s aesthetic project of integrating elements of the Orthodox icon into the ­narrative arts signifies a rejection of the privileged status of logos in Western (and postPetrine Russian) culture. In an unpublished dissertation, Judith Robey posits the traditional iconocentrism of Russian orthodoxy as the conceptual basis for Gogol’s gravitation toward the image: “Perhaps Gogol’s attempt to center his discourse around the image should be understood both in the context of Russia’s historical tradition of the sacred image and against a backdrop of the ‘iconoclastic’ tendencies of western culture.”96 The Gogolian ideal appears to be not the reassertion of the icon so much as the reunion of verbal and visual; toward this goal, Robey theorizes a Gogolian “pictorial code,” by which the author represents certain characters or scenes in visual terms, thereby ­“undermining the boundary between the arts.”97 Finally, and most importantly, these authors variously inscribe, imitate, contest, and transcend Peter’s logos in order to assert their own narrative authority. By giving voice to the “little man” (in the sense of granting him ­recognition and public sympathy), Pushkin and Gogol write against Peter’s postulated semiotic order. Although Evgenii, Akakii, and all their literary brethren are barred from the Word within their poems, the tradition of ­inarticulate “little men” they generate paradoxically gains a literary influence in opposition to Peter’s system of ranks and orders. Writers like Dostoevsky and Bely will inherit and employ this t­ radition of the wordless hero in order to inscribe themselves into the growing tradition and, in this manner, gain their own literary “authority.” This authority refers to the author’s attainment of linguistic agency, his newly achieved ability to verbally create the self and control the world around him. At the supertextual level, then, the real acts of logos in the tradition are committed by the poetic imaginations of those authors who create these hapless heroes and thereby vitalize the imperial capital’s heated contest over the Word. If on the textual level Petersburg’s literary “sons” (literary characters) are denied 96 Ibid., 4. 97 Ibid., 12.

Introduction

social/linguistic authority (symbolized by their inability to create verbally), on a higher, socio-literary level, by creating these wordless heroes, authors like Pushkin perform acts of logos to achieve positions of authority—that is, by writing their powerless heroes, these authors gain power themselves. ­Ultimately, the Petersburg Text itself becomes an entity that both bestows and c­ ompromises authorial agency, by providing a new order, an alternative “signifying system” that allows its users to reach a position of authority, a powerful Word to rival that of Peter.98 As Andrew Reynolds writes, Pushkin and his successors “create a Petersburg text whose values counterbalance and transcend those that are fundamental to the city’s existence—in other words, the fact that it is built on blood, tears, and bones. [. . .] [T]heir most important artistic statements attain the authority of a second, rival, moral government.”99 Each chapter of this book presents a close reading of an essential work of the early nineteenth-century Petersburg Text in which there occur clear instances of substantiated logos, or the Word-made-flesh. To protect the ­“ literariness” of the texts, I have elected not to apply any single theoretical model, instead examining each “chapter” of the Petersburg Text within its own historical, religious, or cultural context. I approach the issue of verbality—both the surplus oral-animating power of the city and the resulting struggle for verbal authority among Peter’s sons—through lenses alternately biblical (The Bronze Horseman, “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Nose”) and historical (“The Queen of Spades,” “The Overcoat”). The subtexts that structure each chapter function as follows: (1) the biblical Book of Job provides a structural and thematic model for Evgenii’s plight in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, allowing the powerless clerk’s final, seemingly inarticulate words “Just you wait!” (Uzho tebe!) to emerge as a subversive, performative curse, potent enough to call down the 98 Buckler notes the irony in these authors’ perpetuation of “the very power relations they protest” (Mapping St. Petersburg, 25). Certainly, there is something paradoxical in the fact that these works, while initially written against Peter’s order, wind up reproducing the very hierarchical relationships they originally challenged; in the closed world of the Petersburg Text, Pushkin becomes the literary counterpart to Peter, inscribing his powerful, originating Word for others to reproduce, while Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely all frantically (and perhaps only half self-consciously) write themselves into the already-established tradition, recycling themes, plots, and even lexicon from their literary “father.” 99 Andrew Reynolds, “Returning the Ticket: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘August’ and the End of the Petersburg Text?” Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (2005): 311.

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angry Petersburg “god” from his pedestal; (2) the deck of cards against which officers try their luck in “The Queen of Spades” represents Peter’s Table of Ranks, the hierarchy of state service and supreme arbiter of status within the tsar’s new semiotic system; the ambitious engineer Germann attempts to thwart Peter’s system with a secret code that would enable him to leap to the top of the “deck,” rather than ascend step by step; (3) in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect,” Petersburg’s central artery is revealed to be the all-consuming mouth of hell, a well-known figure from medieval Christian iconography; at dusk, Petersburg itself is transformed into a narrative icon of the Last Judgment, its illuminated main thoroughfare drawing sinners toward the ravenous mouth at its center; (4) the famous Annunciation motif in “The Nose” highlights the story’s ­preoccupation with the divine Logos and its reception through the acquiescent ear of the virgin; against this Christian backdrop, the runaway nose becomes a particularly carnal incarnation of the Word-made-flesh, exposing Petersburg as a city of sensuality and sin, its inhabitants as flesh devoid of spirit; (5) the Russian orthographic debates of the 1820s–30s saw the elimination of various obsolete letters from secular usage; in “The Overcoat,” the copy clerk Akakii Akakievich is figured as the embodiment of the Cyrillic character kako (K) who breaks free of the city’s rigid “alphabetic” order and ultimately transcends the bounds between insignificance and significance, matter and spirit. Though the subtexts are diverse, each gives shape to a common concern with the creative, living word and its various functions within the unyielding Petersburg power structure—to rebuke, rebel, curse, cajole, deceive, defy, narrate, and, finally, emancipate.100 Despite these variations in approach, the essential “verbal plot” of each tale is revealed to be strikingly similar. By the time Pushkin raised his pen to appraise Peter’s achievement, 130 years had passed since Peter’s legendary Let-there-be had taken material form, and the tsar’s radical Word had petrified into an inflexible order. Peter still stands as the metaphorical Pater of his new 100 As one meticulous reviewer pointed out, not all of these subtexts are even “texts,” in the literal sense. Nonetheless, even these nonverbal subtexts participate in the city’s heated contest over the verbal sign: the numerical code intended to liberate Germann becomes an incantation, repeated obsessively until it will yield its prize—the city itself, with all its attendant wealth and status; and the image of the hellmouth in the Last Judgment icon is a figure of monstrous orality, a site of both creative speech and consumption, expressing the tension between narrative creation and destruction.

Introduction

order, controlling access to the creative Word either directly, as the Bronze Horseman, or by proxy, as one of his literary stand-ins: all of the Important Personages, His Excellencies, and other authority figures of the texts. Pushkin, Gogol, and their literary heirs write a series of “insignificant” heroes, by turns tragic and ridiculous, whose various challenges to Peter and his successors— whether expressed overtly, in open defiance of the tsar, or more stealthily, in an attempt to co-opt the system—encode their creators’ own opposition to the socio-political authority of the city (or, perhaps, their desire for greater power within it). In psychological terms, the literary “sons” of Peter rise up against their historical father to contest control of the word and, by extension, their rightful place in the social order; their endeavors to reach social and linguistic authority are countered with death, madness, or some other form of ­wordlessness, though a few of them will nonetheless achieve a higher, rival logos, beyond the linguistic domain metaphorically controlled by Peter. In animating this battle over creative language and power, the authors of these subversive heroes claim their own position of literary authority from which to contest the ascendant, official imperium of Peter. The foundational works of what would become known as the Petersburg Text inscribe various levels of challenge to authority: Peter seizes the ­performative Logos of God to call forth a glittering new cosmos, seemingly suspended between sky and sea; the devout Russian populace mutters oaths against the official odes to this profane creation; literary authors a century later inherit the creative word, unshackled from sacred duty by Peter’s reforms, and begin to weave their own antiauthoritarian narrative; the characters they create raise their small voices against the city’s new authority figures, articulating something powerful and subversive that contradicts Peter’s order. The P ­ etersburg Text thus chronicles multiple ages and stages of collision between Word and word.

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1 Cursing at the Whirlwind The Book of Job According to Pushkin

Just over a century ago, Valerii Briusov identified three emerging trends in the scholarly response to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, corresponding roughly to the poem’s three dominant ideological planes: the social, the political, and the religious.1 As David Bethea observes, the poem’s religious angle received scant critical attention in the subsequent decades, ­particularly post-1917; the past several years, however, have restored some balance to the critical reception, as a new generation of scholars has begun to address the poem’s rich m ­ etaphysical contexts. In 1990, Igor Nemirovsky argued that the basic organization of Bronze Horseman around sacred events and themes (the creation of the world; the Lord’s wrath; punishment by flood) reveals the Bible as the major creative framework on which Pushkin modeled the world of his Petersburg tale.2 Certainly, as more than one Pushkin scholar has observed, the prologue to The Bronze Horseman stages a cosmogonic drama, featuring Peter the Great as the city’s mythic Creator,   1 For a summary of Briusov’s argument, see David M. Bethea, “The Role of the Eques in Puškin’s Bronze Horseman,” in Puškin Today, ed. David M. Bethea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 99; for more on the interpretive possibilities and tensions within the poem, see Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998), 9–14.   2 I. V. Nemirovskii, “Bibleiskaia tema v ‘Mednom vsadnike,” Russkaia literatura, no. 3 (1990): 3. For more on the poem’s sacred sources, see Bethea, “Role of the Eques,” 99, 227n2; and Gary Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 89–179.

2

Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol

coaxing worlds out of words and wringing cosmos from a swampy chaos.3 Numerous critics have cast the passage as an overtly biblical drama, starring Peter as more than just any old demiurge: urban theorist Marshall Berman calls the prologue “a kind of Petersburg Book of Genesis, beginning in the mind of the city’s creator-God,” and Gary Rosenshield reads the step-bystep genesis outlined in the prologue as a metaphoric deification.4 Without a doubt, Peter’s biblical pedigree has been well established in the ­critical literature; but what of his mortal counterpart, Evgenii: did Pushkin’s poor hero also have a scriptural forerunner? Consider the following synopsis: A creator-God surveys his creation. We meet our hero, an honorable man who fully trusts in his creator’s existing order. A sudden heavenly interference robs him of his possessions and loved ones. The humble, patient hero of the story’s opening is transformed by his devastating loss into an enraged rebel who, convinced of his own innocence, defiantly curses the creator. At the story’s climax, the divine injustice drives the mad hero to openly challenge his God, demanding an explanation for his suffering. The God-figure descends and, whirling in fury, silences his subject with an overwhelming display of power. The hero, awed by this demonstration of authority, is finally subdued into repentance. In the end, God rewards the hero for his submission by restoring his goods and health twofold. Until the final twist, this brief outline of the biblical Book of Job could equally well describe the plot contours of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. The undeniable   3 For a summary of scholarship on the mythic dimensions of Peter’s creation, see Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, “The Couvade of Peter the Great,” in Puškin Today, 71, 226n1.   4 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 182; Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 91–95. Of course, the Peter-as-Creator interpretation is hardly a recent addition to the critical understanding of the poem: in 1924, the prominent Petersburg scholar Antsiferov identified the unnamed On (He) who opens Bronze Horseman as “a spirit creating out of nothingness, the opposition of the elements overcome through his miraculous will. ‘Let there be light; and there was light.’ A miracle of creation was accomplished. A new world arose—Petersburg” (N. P. Antsiferov, Byl’ i mif Peterburga, in Dusha Peterburga, 67).

Cursing at the Whirlwind

thematic similarities led the Soviet critic A. Tarkhov to postulate a Joban subtext to Pushkin’s “Petersburg povest’”; since the publication of his brief but ­provocative article in 1977, however, the connections between the two poems have not been more fully explored or elaborated.5 This study investigates the rich echoes of the Job text that resound within Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman from various perspectives: the poet’s familiarity with and admiration for the Old Testament tale and his treatment of Joban themes in his earlier creative work; the structural and thematic parallels between the biblical story and the nineteenth-century poem; and finally, a close analysis of the key themes of logos and creation in both texts. At the outset, it is worth considering why the poet might have chosen to pattern Evgenii’s tale after the notoriously difficult Book of Job; after all, the revelation of a subtext drawn from the problematic biblical story could hardly serve to simplify The Bronze Horseman: the two poems are bound by their refusal to offer an unambiguous message, with each generating multitudes of meanings and providing fertile interpretive ground for generations of critics and general readers alike. Perhaps the answer lies in the repressive political climate of the years directly following the Decembrist uprising, which made it dangerous for artists to deal   5 A. Tarkhov, “Povest’ o peterburgskom Iove,” Nauka i religiia, no. 2 (1977): 62–64. I d­ iscovered the Joban underpinnings of The Bronze Horseman by chance, while researching Job for an unrelated project. Only in the course of investigating Pushkin’s interest in the Job story did I uncover Tarkhov’s valuable thirty-year-old article, which—though it has made some ripples in Pushkin studies—has unfortunately escaped detailed critical attention in the West. Several Russian scholars have touched on Tarkhov’s argument, though few go far beyond either agreeing (I. B. Itkin) or disagreeing (A. N. Arkhangel’skii, L. Zvonnikova) with his basic claim. A. M. Ranchin recognizes the parallels but stresses that the contrasts (between Peter and God, for instance) are also significant; Nemirovskii conditionally accepts Tarkhov’s claim, though he notes that, since Peter is an idol, Evgenii’s rebellion doesn’t amount to theomachy so much as “idolomachy” (kumiroborchestvo); in any case, he is more interested in mapping out the broad biblical/eschatological bases of the poem than in locating particular sources. D. P. Ivinskii’s response will be treated in more detail later in the paper. See Nemirovskii, “Bibleiskaia tema,” 3–17; A. N. Arkhangel’skii, Geroi Pushkina: Ocherki literaturnoi kharakterologii (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1999); D.P. Ivinskii, Pushkin i Mitskevich: Istoriia literaturnykh otnoshenii (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2003); A. M. Ranchin, “Kto vinovat? Eshche raz ob avtorskoi pozitsii v poeme A. S. Pushkina ‘Mednyi Vsadnik,’” Literatura (2004), http://lit.1september.ru/article.php?ID=200402605; Livia Zvonnikova, “Peterburgskii Iov,” Zhurnal’nyi zal (2012), http://magazines.russ.ru/october/2012/6/z17. html; and I. B. Itkin, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’: Dva potopa,” in Res Philologica: Essays in Memory of Maksim Il’ich Shapir (Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2014), 159–72.

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Acts of Logos in Pushkin and Gogol

explicitly with themes of justice, revolt, and individuality; it may be that weaving a Joban thread deep within the fabric of his poem allowed Pushkin to ­simultaneously explore and conceal these subversive ideas within his work. The Job intertext introduces the politically dangerous notion of theodicy into an already risky poem:6 the biblical rebel decried the lack of justice he discerned in his creator’s order and called for divine justification. Informed by this s­ ubtextual stratum of meaning, Evgenii’s apparently unsophisticated threat is revealed to contain a direct challenge to the very legitimacy of Peter’s world building. While no single reading can promise an interpretive key, reevaluating The Bronze Horseman through this lens illuminates new facets of the poem’s themes of imperial authority and accountability, as well as individual subversion and rebellion. The intertextual approach to the poem was galvanized by L. V. P ­ umpiansky’s 1939 article on Pushkin’s appropriation and subversion of the eighteenth-­ century odic tradition and Wacław Lednicki’s magisterial 1955 volume on Pushkin’s polemic with Adam Mickiewicz, in which he notes the poem’s “mosaic character” in relation to its various sources.7 The approach became more prominent in the 1980s, and recent generations of scholars have added sources as ancient as the divine Word and as recent as Pushkin’s contemporary Washington Irving.8 These various strands of literary quotation should not be treated as discrete threads, however; they interlace and interact with one another, weaving fine intertextual networks through the poem. Likewise, the Job story is more than just an additional coating of allusion, straining the fabric of an already overworked poem; rather, it shapes and integrates the work’s various layers, braiding together sources from the poetic, religious, and political spheres (the eighteenth-century ode; Mickiewicz’s Dziady [Forefathers’ Eve];   6 The tsar is not actually God, of course, and it might seem problematic to apply the term “theodicy” to the analysis of a monarch’s injustice. As we shall see, however, Peter’s quite literal deification in the eighteenth-century poetic and political traditions legitimizes the treatment of his reign and its interpretation in this light.   7 See Kahn, Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 17; L.V. Pumpianskii, “‘Mednyi Vsadnik’ i poeticheskaia traditsiia XVIII veka,” in Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, 4–5 (1939), 91–124; Wacław Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman: The Story of a Masterpiece (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1955), 19.   8 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 92–93; Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’: A Curious Case of Cultural Cross-Fertilization?” Slavic Review 58, no. 2 (1999): 337– 51.

Cursing at the Whirlwind

the Genesis story; Pushkin’s archival research on Peter the Great) into a single coherent and unified interpretation.

“Heaven’s mockery of earth”: A Petersburg Book of Job Pushkin and the Bible During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, educated Russians were becoming increasingly interested in the Bible and its translations. The Russian branch of the Bible Society, an organization dedicated to translating and publishing the Bible throughout the world, was established in 1813 and i­mmediately embarked on its translation of the Slavonic Bible into c­ ontemporary Russian.9 Tsar Alexander I was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Bible Society (RBS), even joining the society in its early years. By the early 1820s, however, the reign of Alexander had become increasingly conservative; the development of secret societies within Russia, including the RBS, fueled Alexander’s fear of rebellion, and the society quickly became ensnared in ­political controversy. Meanwhile, the idea of bible translation itself was becoming contentious, as Orthodox clergymen opposed the translation of holy texts into the Russian vernacular. In November 1825 the tsar, with the ­encouragement of the Church, ordered an end to biblical translation, and the society soon disbanded.10 By the time of its dissolution in 1826, the Russian Bible Society had released the Gospels and the entire New Testament in Russian;11 a complete Russian translation of the Old Testament, however, would not be published until 1876.12 In the early 1820s, with the activities of the Bible Society a ­fashionable topic among the St. Petersburg elite, Pushkin himself became increasingly interested in the Bible and its translations. His interest in the Book continued   9 For more information on the Russian Bible Society (Rossiiskoe bibleiskoe obshchestvo) and its powerful political and cultural presence in these years, see Stephen K. Batalden, Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12–88; I. A. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii na russkii iazyk, 2nd ed. (1899; reprint Moscow, 1997); and Gabriella Safran, “Love Songs between the Sacred and the Vernacular: Pushkin’s ‘Podrazhaniia’ in the Context of Bible Translation,” Slavic and East European Journal 39, no. 2 (1995): 165–83. 10 Safran, “Love Songs,” 167. 11 Shaw, “Puškin’s ‘The Stationmaster’ and the New Testament Parable,” Slavic and East European Journal 21, no. 1 (1977): 6. 12 Ibid., 24.

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long after the dissolution of the society, however, when “such interest could be regarded as potentially subversive rather than merely fashionable.”13 Sacred books, and particularly the Bible, hold a vital position among the varied works of world literature that engaged and inspired Pushkin throughout his artistic career. Pushkin most explicitly drew his inspiration from religious texts in The Gavriiliad (Gavriiliada, 1821), a blasphemous parody of the A ­ nnunciation; “Imitations of the Koran” (Podrazhaniia Koranu, 1824) a cycle based on material from the Koran; “The Prophet” (Prorok, 1826), based on a passage from Isaiah; and “Imitations” (Podrazhaniia, 1829), composed of two earlier poems, the unnamed source of which was the Song of Songs. The delayed publication of the imitations, as well as the poem’s ambiguous title, ­demonstrates the growing religious and political opposition to the translation of sacred texts into vernacular language.14 Pushkin’s inspiration was hardly confined to such “official” biblical texts: in 1835 he put the apocryphal book of Judith into verse, and in 1836 drew the lyric “Desert fathers and immaculate women” (Ottsy pustynniki i zheny neporochny) from a prayer by St. Ephrem the Syrian. In addition to these famous translations and “imitations” of biblical and other religious texts, there are many examples of more implicit allusions to biblical stories (for instance, the prodigal son subtext of “The Stationmaster”; the Holy Week interpretation of the “Stone Island” cycle; etc.).15 While Pushkin laces many of his works with clues pointing the way to hidden references (such as the German pictures presenting the Parable of the Prodigal Son in “The S­ tationmaster”), other allusions remain more oblique. In general, it is quite common to find hidden correspondences to biblical texts in Pushkin’s work, composing only a single layer of meaning in a many-layered text.

13 Safran, “Love Songs,” 167. At the time of the poet’s death, his library held a French translation of the entire Bible by Le Maistre de Sacy and a translation of the New Testament into Serbo-Croatian, as well as two unidentified Bibles. In his final years, Pushkin had also purchased six volumes of a new, annotated French translation of the Old Testament with Hebrew on facing pages (B. L. Modzalevskii, Biblioteka A. S. Pushkina [1910; reprint Moscow: Kniga, 1988], items 604, 253, 605). For more on the Bible translations to which Pushkin had access, see Shaw, “Puškin’s ‘The Stationmaster,’” 6, 24. 14 Safran, “Love Songs,” 165. 15 See M. Gershenzon, “Stantsionnyi smotritel’,” in Mudrost’ Pushkina (Moscow: Pisateli v Moskve: 1919), 122–27; Sergei Davydov, “Puškin’s Easter Triptych: ‘Hermit fathers and immaculate women,’ ‘Imitation of the Italian,’ and ‘Secular Power,’” in Puškin Today, 38–58.

Cursing at the Whirlwind

Pushkin and Job By 1833, as Pushkin worked directly on his Petersburg poema, the Bible stood “at the center of his creative interests.”16 Among the various biblical passages that inspired Pushkin in this period, particular attention must be paid to the poet’s deep, personal interest in the Book of Job. Pushkin was hardly alone in his admiration for the Job story. As Thomas Vogler argues, while Job has endured as a perennial favorite among artists and thinkers, certain eras are particularly receptive to the questions posed by the ancient text, and ­eighteenth-century Europe displayed such a “Job-ripeness.”17 Indeed, writes Jonathan Sheehan, the Enlightenment period in England and Germany saw a revival of interest in the Book of Job, resulting in dozens of new translations and retellings, both poetic and scholarly, by such thinkers as Robert Lowth, John Garnett, Charles Peters, and Leonard Chappelow.18 This new wave of Job inquiry surged into the following century, and the text became a prominent feature of Romantic literature and thought.19 Well-known Romantic ­engagements with the Job text include literary analyses by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1782–83) and Thomas Carlyle (1840); William Blake’s famous engravings (1806–26); Goethe’s Faust, which opens with a quotation from Job and recontextualizes its heavenly wager (published in full posthumously in 1832);20 and Melville’s Moby Dick, which presents, in Vogler’s view, America’s 16 Nemirovskii, “Bibleiskaia tema,” 10. 17 Thomas A. Vogler, “Eighteenth-Century Logology and the Book of Job,” Religion and Literature 20, no. 3 (1988): 26. Such eras are Hiob-reif, in Ehrenberg’s term; see Hans Ehrenberg, Hiob, der Existentialist: Fünf Dialoge in zwei Teilen (Heidelberg: L. Schneider), 1952, quoted in Vogler, “Eighteenth-Century Logology,” 25. 18 Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 160–68; for a detailed list of the artists and theorists participating in the movement, see Vogler, “Eighteenth-Century Logology,” 26–30. 19 Ilana Pardes, “Job’s Leviathan: Between Melville and Alter,” Prooftexts 27, no. 2 (2007), 237. 20 Gerard de Nerval’s French translation of the first part of Faust was released in 1828; Pushkin’s own “Scene from Faust,” a lyric modeled on Goethe’s poem, was composed that same year. Tangentially, there are also some suggestive textual parallels between the Petrine plotline of The Bronze Horseman and part II of Faust, which was published after Goethe’s death in 1832, one year before Pushkin composed his poem: in acts IV and V, the aging Faust decides he wants to conquer nature by taming the waves of the sea; through Mephistopheles, Faust is granted huge tracts of swampland to drain and reclaim; he becomes the ruler of this revitalized and productive society poised on the land between high and low tide; although he believes his vision is close to realization, the final act contains warnings about the dangers

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own “revisionary reaction to the eighteenth-century Job discourse.”21 In ­addition, the young Pushkin’s Romantic idol Byron named the Book of Job “the first drama in the world and perhaps the oldest poem,” going on to admit, “I had an idea of writing a ‘Job,’ but I found it too sublime. There is no poetry to be compared with it.”22 It should be noted that this artistic embrace of Job extended into Russia, as well: Lomonosov composed a famous ode based on God’s speech from the whirlwind;23 the poet Fedor Glinka began his free translation of the book of Job in 1826, completing it around the time of The Bronze ­Horseman’s composition; and Fedor Bruni’s painting of the Nehushtan (The Bronze Serpent [Mednyi zmii]), whose subject Tarkhov relates to the Book of Job, was also begun in 1826.24 The Romantics’ artistic enthrallment with the Job text might be explained by the age’s preoccupation with political and social injustice; after all, the poem’s central theodicy corresponds, in the socio-political realm, to an anxiety over the impotence and degradation of the little man against an omnipotent, deified autocracy. Prior to the Joban renaissance of the eighteenth century, theological and interpretive attention had hovered around the patient Job of the prologue;25

21 22 23 24 25

and possible inhumanity of the new regime as his project leads to the ruin and death of the old villagers Philemon and Baucis. Mikhail Epstein acknowledges the “unintended correlations” between the two poems, but denies any direct influence (“Faust na beregu moria,” Voprosy literatury, no. 6 [1981]: 89–110), and John Bayley has maintained that Pushkin was unaware of Faust, part II (Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], 197); Pushkin on Literature [London: Athlone Press, 1986], xxix), though he doesn’t say how he knows this to be true. In fact, it is quite probable that Pushkin— who had already written his “Scene from Faust,” and was very likely in explicit dialogue with Faust, part I, in The Bronze Horseman—would have been eagerly anticipating and aware of Faust II’s release, even if he was unable to read it in the original. Given these intertextual connections, I am not convinced that the thematic and philosophical correspondences between the two poems should be entirely dismissed as accidental. I am grateful to my colleague Dennis Mahoney for bringing this connection to my attention. Vogler, “Eighteenth-Century Logology,” 42. Thomas Medwin, “Conversations of Lord Byron,” The London Magazine 10 (November 1824): 459, http://books.google.com/books?id=V4cYAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA449#v=one page&q&f=false. M. V. Lomonosov, “Oda, vybrannaia iz Iova, glava 38, 39, 40 i 41,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. S. I. Vavilov (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1950–83), 8:387. A. E. Tarkhov, “Razmyshleniia po povodu odnoi illiustratsii k ‘Mednomu vsadniku,’” in “Venok Pushkinu,” ed. A. M. Kuznetsov, Al’manakh bibliofila 23 (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), 289n. Pardes, “Job’s Leviathan,” 239.

Cursing at the Whirlwind

the revised Enlightenment representation of the poem, however, emphasized the Almighty’s speech from the whirlwind as its true soul: Vogler identifies several trends as characteristic of the eighteenth-century perception of the poem, including an aestheticization of the sublime and an emphasis on power and terror; the intellectual humiliation of Job by an obliterating deity; and the impotence of human language before the omnipotent divine Logos.26 Once attention had shifted from the resigned sufferer Job to the nature of the World-speaking God, Romantic artists were free to indulge “the radical possibility of reading both God and Job as imperfect,” a reading that invited a critique of institutions, both religious and, by extension, political.27 It is this iteration of the Job story—aesthetically and intellectually reconstituted during the ­Enlightenment and now viewed through the Romantics’ rebellious lens—that Pushkin inherited in the 1820s. The first references to Job’s name in Pushkin’s own correspondences trace back to the period of his exile: in October 1823, he refers in French to his ­correspondent, Aleksandr Raevsky, as “aimable Job Lovelace.”28 Later, in June 1824, he urges Aleksandr Bestuzhev to “Take heart, and give me an answer quickly, as the god of Job or Lomonosov says,” paraphrasing Lomonosov’s “Ode, Selected from Job.”29 In a spring 1824 letter to his friend Wilhelm ­Küchelbecker, Pushkin alludes to the Bible and Goethe in a single breath, reporting that, while the Holy Spirit is “close to his heart” (po serdtsu), when he reads the Bible, he prefers Goethe;30 as the scholar I. Iu. Iur’eva notes, “It is possible that even then Pushkin had turned his attention to the Book of Job, a cluster of themes and motifs of which are embodied in ‘Faust.’”31 In 1828 he considered prefacing his poem “The Rabble” (Chern’) with a line from Job, rendered in drafts as “Poslushaite glagol moikh” (Listen to my words) and 26 Vogler, “Eighteenth-Century Logology,” 26–34. 27 Pardes, “Job’s Leviathan,” 239. 28 A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich et al., 17 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1937–59), volume 13, page 71. Hereafter, references to the Polnoe sobranie will be cited as PSS, with volume and page number separated by a colon, e.g. PSS, 13:71. 29 “Muzhaisia—dai otvet skorei, kak govorit bog Iova ili Lomonosova” (ibid., 13:101). 30 Ibid., 13:92. 31 I. Iu. Iur’eva, “Bibleiskaia Kniga Iova v tvorchestve Pushkina,” Russkaia literatura, no. 1 (1995): 184.

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accompanied by the chapter and verse, both written in Old Church Slavic (OCS).32 Pushkin’s citation of the verse and numeral in OCS supports the notion that he had read Job in that language. Most significantly, in October 1832 P. V. Kireevsky wrote to N. M. Iazykov of Pushkin’s intention to translate the Book of Job from Hebrew into Russian: “Pushkin spent two weeks in Moscow and left the day before yesterday. He is studying Hebrew with the intention of translating Job.”33 In addition to his multivolume French Bible with parallel Hebrew text, Pushkin obtained an 1826 poetic translation of the Book of Job in French.34 As Kireevsky’s letter from Moscow indicates, however, the poet decided not to limit himself either to the available Church Slavonic Bible or to his French translations for his planned translation of Job, but to turn instead to the original text. In order to teach himself ancient Hebrew, Pushkin purchased dictionaries and other specialized editions, including a lexicon of biblical Hebrew with Latin definitions and a work on the elements of Hebrew written by a professor of Hebrew at the University of London.35 In May 1832, he copied the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into a notebook with notes about their sounds, names, and ­corresponding Greek letters.36 Tarkhov takes this diligent preparation as ­confirmation that the Job translation indeed figured prominently among the poet’s upcoming projects,37 and he conjectures that, although Pushkin’s intention to translate Job into Russian ultimately went unrealized, the project would later find expression in his masterpiece The Bronze Horseman. Following his return from southern exile, Pushkin would repeatedly and urgently revisit themes from the Book of Job in his writings. Well before his planned translation of Job, references to the book began to appear in his poetry. The treatment of Joban themes and motifs in his creative work has been 32 The quotation, an inexact citation of Job 13:17 (“Poslushaite, poslushaite glagol moikh”), is identified in the notebook as “Іовъ. Гл. Г̃І” [ Job 13]. The verse was inscribed on a draft of “The Rabble” (“Poet na lire vdokhnovennoi”) and was probably intended as an epigraph for the lyric. See PSS, 3:715. 33 Istoricheskii vestnik 12 (1883): 535, quoted in A. G. Chizhov, “‘. . . kak govorit bog Iova ili Lomonosova’: Iz kommentariia k lirike Pushkina,” Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii 24 (1991): 143. 34 D. D. Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put’ Pushkina (1826–1830) (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1967), 173. 35 Modzalevskii, Biblioteka A. S. Pushkina, items 692, 1014. 36 Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put’, 175. 37 Tarkhov, “Povest’ o peterburgskom Iove,” 62–63.

Cursing at the Whirlwind

discussed variously by Blagoi, Nepomnyashchy, Lesskis, Tarkhov, Chizhov and Iur’eva. In Blagoi’s influential reading, the three poems “A Recollection” (Vospominaniia), “Futile Gift” (Dar naprasnyi),” and “In Times of Diversion or Idle Boredom” (V chasy zabav il’ prazdnoi skuki)” compose a unified cycle, each retelling a different section of the Job story.38 In her 1995 article, Iur’eva attempts to follow the poet’s treatment of the Job theme more broadly, outlining a sequence of works containing echoes of the biblical text and attempting to reveal concrete correspondences.39 In her view, the profound correlations between Pushkin’s works and the Book of Job lie beyond the boundaries of earlier critical investigations, which limited themselves mainly to “Futile Gift” and the resulting poetic exchange with Metropolitan Filaret.40 Indeed, according to Tarkhov, while Joban motifs sound especially loudly in three lyrics between 1828 and 1830 (which he identifies as “Futile Gift,” “The Rabble” and “In Times of Diversion”),41 the most important fruit of this creative union would appear only a few years later, in The Bronze Horseman.

The Bronze Horseman and Job Tarkhov’s radical claim of a new biblical influence on the creative history of The Bronze Horseman cast the poem—both as a whole and in its separate episodes— in a new light. Identifying the humble civil servant of The Bronze Horseman with 38 For a more detailed reading of Pushkin’s Job lyrics, see Blagoi, Tvorcheskii put’, 172–80. 39 Iur’eva, “Bibleiskaia kniga Iova,” 187. Iur’eva views the Job text as a rich source of inspiration for Pushkin’s lyric poetry; however, she believes that the poet’s extravagant plans to translate or “imitate” the Book of Job ultimately went unfulfilled: “Unfortunately, these grand plans for a poetic translation (or adaptation) of the Book of Job remained unrealized” (188). Conversely, although Oleg Proskurin does not discuss the Joban themes in “Futile Gift” directly, he maintains that Pushkin, having recently avoided exile in the Gavriiliad episode, is unlikely to have risked publishing a poem with discernable theomachistic themes. See Oleg Proskurin, “Pushkin and Metropolitan Philaret: Rethinking the Problem,” in Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations, ed. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 133. 40 For a fascinating exploration of the complex poetic exchange between poet and metropolitan, see Proskurin, “Pushkin and Metropolitan Philaret,” 112–56. Proskurin deconstructs the popular conversion narrative (in which the correspondence with Filaret is treated as the spiritual turning point for the fallen poet), perceptively arguing that Pushkin strategically shifted the terms of their exchange from faith (and its absence) to the “sacred nature of [. . .] the poet’s higher calling” (144). 41 Tarkhov, “Povest’ o peterburgskom Iove,” 62–64.

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the defiant rebel of the Old Testament story, Tarkhov reveals Evgenii’s one-man stand against Peter as theomachy, or a battle against God. His three-page article focuses primarily on the depiction of Evgenii’s submission in the second part of the poem, showing that his apparent capitulation before the idol does not represent an indiscriminate reacceptance of the Petrine contract. A decade later, Tarkhov expanded his Joban reading of The Bronze Horseman by linking it to the well-documented polemic between Pushkin and Mickiewicz. Jozef Tretiak had been the first to note the broad thematic and ideological parallels between Pushkin’s poema and Mickiewicz’s Oleszkiewicz, a poem that Pushkin presumably knew well, having copied it into his working notebook and referred to it in a footnote to The Bronze Horseman.42 In Tarkhov’s updated analysis, the rebellious “pilgrim” of Mickiewicz’s Digression, whom scholars read as a ­prototype for Evgenii, was inspired by the biblical figure of Samson; Pushkin responded to Mickiewicz’s Samsonesque wanderer with his own biblical rebel, based on Job.43 The scholar D. P. Ivinsky finds the Samson-Job connection unconvincing, but he offers his own compelling response to Tarkhov’s proposal.44 As he notes, the penultimate stanza of Mickiewicz’s poem, in which the single chain restraining the heaving waves threatens to break beneath audible hammer blows, echoes Job 38, in which God sets barriers to halt the waves of the sea. Ivinsky speculates that this subtle reference, in which ­Oleszkiewicz prophesies the devastating rupture of the sea’s chains, may have given Pushkin the idea to build his own Petersburg flood poem on the same biblical foundation.45 Ivinsky’s hypothesis has merit; as we have seen, Pushkin wrote out Mickiewicz’s poem sometime after 1832;46 it was only a short while earlier, in May 1832, that he had copied the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into 42 Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, 36; M. G. Basker, “Notes of Confusion: On the Footnotes to The Bronze Horseman,” in Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, 2: Alexander Pushkin, Myth and Monument, ed. Robert Reid and Joe Andrew (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 141; Oleszkiewicz is the final poem in the Digression section of part III of Mickiewicz’s Dziady. It is worth noting that Tretiak’s groundbreaking 1906 treatment of the two poems was further elaborated in Lednicki’s 1955 comparative study, and the Polish origins of Pushkin’s poem are still generally accepted over a century after their first assertion (see Jozef Tretiak, ­Mickiewicz i Puszkin: Studya i szkice [Warsaw: Nakladem Ksiegarni E. Wende, 1906]). 43 Tarkhov, “Razmyshleniia,” 287. 44 Ivinskii, Pushkin i Mitskevich, 297. 45 Ibid., 304. 46 Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, 25–42.

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his notebook in preparation for his Job translation. It is not unlikely that the poet, with Job and Oleszkiewicz occupying both his mind and his notes, would have discerned in Mickiewicz’s four-line reference to the unfettered waves an allusion to Job. A more detailed look at the structure and content of the Job story will facilitate further investigation into the textual parallels between the two poems. The forty-two-chapter Old Testament text consists broadly of a series of verse dialogues set within a prose frame.47 The brief introductory and concluding prose sections are generally thought to make up the oldest element of the Book, an ancient folk tale introducing a pious, patient hero and setting up and resolving his central conflict. Within this framing device sits the dramatic poem that constitutes the bulk of the Job narrative. The poem consists roughly of three sections: Job’s laments and avowals of innocence; three cycles of dialogues with his friends, who attempt to make him repent; and God’s response to Job from the whirlwind followed by Job’s repentance. In the prose introduction, God grants Satan permission to test Job’s faith by robbing him, first of his ­property and children’s lives, then of his own health. Job initially reacts to God’s verdicts with patient acceptance, but by the opening of the central poem in chapter three, he has been transformed from the virtuous, long-suffering ­character familiar from proverbs (“the patience of Job”) into a defiant and reproachful man. His seemingly unmerited torment convinces him that the source of human suffering is not sin, but rather divine whim and injustice. He verbally attacks God and questions His righteousness, essentially accusing Him of cosmic negligence. In the story’s climactic confrontation, the voice from the whirlwind does not contradict Job’s conclusion; rather, God silences His accuser with a deafening reassertion of His own creative powers. Job is ­intimidated into repentance, and in the prose epilogue is rewarded with the restoration of his former prosperity. 47 It is important to remember that prose and poetry were not as clearly distinguished in Hebrew Scripture as they are in modern translations of the Bible. There is much controversy in the scholarly tradition surrounding the literary characterization of biblical verses, and our modern generic definitions cannot be easily applied. For the sake of simplicity, I have adopted the standard designation of prose frame and poetic interior as employed in Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and David Penchansky, The Betrayal of God: Ideological Conflict in Job ­(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990).

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Genre Both the Book of Job and Bronze Horseman are mixed-genre poems, the first a long poem within a short prose frame, and the latter an unconventional verse tale set against a traditional ode.48 The two “halves” of the Book of Job exist in different genres, resulting in a disparate text that stubbornly resists resolution. The disjunction between prose frame and poetic center presents the most obvious source of dissonance, producing a poem “at odds with itself.”49 The juxtaposition of the text’s conflicting parts generates obvious gaps in style and characterization:50 where one text presents a capricious god testing his patient servant, the other depicts an all-powerful God thundering against his ­blasphemous challenger; and as Zuckerman details, the “patient” Job of the prose brackets clashes dramatically with the “impatient” Job depicted in the poem.51 These clashes in genre, style, and purpose result in an “act of literature that is characteristically unstable, a place of conflict.”52 Readings that attempt to impose unity must ignore or misconstrue major components of the text; Job’s traditional interpretation as a discourse on patience, for instance, relies on the suppression of the entire middle section of the poem. To account for these disparities, Bible scholars have posited both stylistic and historical explanations of the text’s authorship. Some contemporary critics approach the resulting dissonance with a modern sensibility, theorizing that the text was composed by a single author, who varied his voice for literary effect.53 Most, however, insist that the simple folk tale of the frame and the long poetic dialogues at the center 48 While it is true that these generic distinctions are not as clearly marked in the original Hebrew, it is important to remember that Pushkin was working not from the Hebrew but from at least two translations of the Bible: the French translation by Le Maistre de Sacy and the OCS. Neither of these Bibles was translated from the Hebrew: the Vulgate (Latin) provided the source text for the French Bible, while the OCS was based on both the Vulgate and the Septuagint (Greek). Both of these Bibles demonstrate the same prose/poetry distinction familiar from standard modern English translations: the verses of the prologue and epilogue (Chapters 1–2 and 42:7–17) employ long narrative “prose” lines, while those of the intervening chapters are broken into much shorter “poetic” lines. 49 Zuckerman, Job the Silent, 14. 50 For a thorough account of the stylistic distinctions across different sections of Job, see Penchansky, Betrayal of God, 27–41. 51 Zuckerman, Job the Silent, 14. 52 Penchansky, Betrayal of God, 9. 53 For more on this theory of unitary authorship, see ibid., 29.

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must have originated at different times, from different authors or communities.54 Regardless of authorship or intent, the generic clash at the heart of the poem provides a structural counterpart to its central themes of struggle and conflict. A similar blending of genres is immediately apparent from Bronze ­Horseman’s subtitle, Peterburgskaia povest’, which draws attention to the generic contrast between the poema, a narrative poem, and the povest’, a prose novella featuring common events and protagonist.55 While Evgenii’s story unfolds in the verse “tale” of the subtitle, Peter the Great and his extraordinary act of creation cannot be contained within the prosaic confines of such a genre; instead, to create a properly divine image of Peter, Pushkin draws on the ­traditions of the eighteenth-century panegyric ode. The ode of the introduction and the povest’ of parts I and II remain unconnected, poised in direct ­opposition to one another, each genre presenting its proper hero and recounting its own events.56 Constraints of the genres separate Evgenii and Peter, emphasizing their differences and distance. As in Job, this structure of opposition highlights the poem’s overarching theme of conflict: the contrast between Peter and Evgenii, “between the rights and interests of the capital and the Empire on the one hand and the personal rights and interests of the anonymous individual on the other,”57 are underscored by the poem’s generic apposition. In addition, just as the generic disunities of Job reflect and express a ­disruption in the social order, Evgenii’s story—an implicit negation of the ­optimism of the panegyric prologue—undercuts the narrator’s paean to Peter. The story of Evgenii, who is subdued by the Bronze Horseman and buried at the end of his povest’, nonetheless exposes the fissures in the brilliant surface of Peter’s creation, allowing readers to recognize in his new order the elements of a terrible disorder. The specific contrast between the highly standardized odic tradition and the looser conventions of the povest’ mirrors this theme of order disrupted.58 54 On the relationship between the text’s inconsistencies and theories of authorship, see ibid. 55 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 91. 56 The poem similarly blurs generic boundaries with its introduction and notes lending a factual tone to the imagined events it portrays. 57 Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, 51. 58 L.V. Pumpianskii isolated three formulas prevalent in the “official” poetic tradition of Peter’s city (iz t’my lesov, iz topi blat; gde prezhde . . . tam; proshlo sto let) to demonstrate the appropriation of odic forms evident in Pushkin’s prologue (for a comprehensive list of the topoi Pushkin derived from the Petrine-age ode, see L. V. Pumpianskii, “‘Mednyi Vsadnik’ i

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As we have seen, generic contrast performed a similar function in Job: in the placid prose frame, Job patiently accepts the actions of God, however arbitrary; in contrast, the more abrupt poetic lines that convey his complaints, curses, and challenges interrupt and disrupt this order of mortal acceptance. The high poetic lines of the prologue running up against the dark, prosaic povest’ communicate a parallel clash between the harmony of Peter’s artificial order and the challenge to the order issued by a defiant subject.59 The generic discord suggests the central Petersburg themes of verbal authority and ­rebellion, as the set, orderly logos of Peter is cut short by the sharply raised voice of his subject.

Innocence and Punishment Up until the finale, the Book of Job and The Bronze Horseman follow equivalent narrative contours, featuring blameless men who suffer devastating loss at the hand of divine or semidivine forces, and outlining these lowly heroes’ journeys from innocence to insurgency. The Job story introduces its central questions of suffering and justice by conjuring a scenario in which God is lured into a wager with Satan over the righteousness of an innocent subject. God allows Satan to destroy his “blameless and upright” ( Job 1:8) servant without cause, and in quick succession, Job loses his animals, his children, and finally his health. Job patiently endures his losses, demonstrating his initial acceptance of God’s order: “‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’” ( Job 1:21). poeticheskaia traditsiia XVIII veka,” Pushkin: Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, nos. 4–5 [1939]: 91–124). As Kahn explains, the lexical content and metrical form of neoclassical odes were generally fixed and conventional; variation was welcome within a well-established set of rules. The brilliance of Pushkin’s prologue, in Kahn’s view, derives in part from its contrivance to “follow the neoclassical tendency to rehabilitate conventional language and intermittently employ the strict stanzaic format of the ode,” thus prompting readers’ expectations of a generically appropriate Petrine-age message (Kahn, Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 45–46). 59 It is interesting to note that in Job, poetry performs a naturally disruptive, disorderly function. Similarly, one of the “elements” (stikhiia) conquered in the prologue to The Bronze Horseman is language itself, as words are honed into perfect odic verses (stikhi). Are they truly conquered, however? The transition from the elevated prologue to part I shows their rebellion: a poetic “reduction” in style (from ode to near prose) and subject (from Peter/ God to humble clerk), just as the theme shifts from order to the flood.

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In Pushkin’s poema, Evgenii’s once-exalted family name (prozvan’e) has been diminished, and his rightful position effectively dissolved by the Petrine restructuring of the civil service. We are offered a glimpse of his compliant nature through his response to his disadvantaged social position: although e­ ntitled to higher rank under the old order (the name Evgenii, or “highborn,” implies this entitlement; one might surmise that he, like Pushkin, is descended from one of those once-powerful families that lost influence under Peter’s reforms), he is not resentful about his lowered standing, and is, rather, ready to work to gain “both independence and honor.”60 Like Job, then, Evgenii is r­ econciled to his initial “loss”; only later, after his fiancée Parasha has been swept away by the flood, along with his dream of a simple family life, will this compliance be truly tested. Association with Job illuminates the antediluvian submissiveness of Pushkin’s young hero; even after his initial loss, Evgenii—like Job before him— humbly accepts the given order. The subtext also hints at the flaws in Peter’s very order, showing his rule to be as arbitrary and capricious as that of the God depicted in Job; there is something wrong, this reading suggests, with a social order that prevents even Evgenii’s modest dreams.

Challenge to God Following an initial acceptance of loss, the hero of each poem rises up to challenge the creator who caused his suffering, either directly or indirectly. Job’s transition from the passive servant of the prologue to the active hero of the poetic discourses is signaled by seven days of silence, broken with a curse. In an abrupt reversal of the meekness he displayed in the first two chapters, Job now begins to chronicle his every misery, loudly challenging the conventional notion of “Job the patient.”61 His experience of innocent suffering is ­incompatible with his expectation of divine recompense, whereby righteousness should be 60 “i nezavisimost’ i chest’” (PSS, 5:139). Hereafter in this chapter, references to volume 5 of the Polnoe sobranie, the volume that contains The Bronze Horseman, will generally be identified within the text, along with the original Russian, by page number only. All translations of the poem are adapted from Walter Arndt’s Pushkin Threefold (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 401–27. 61 For more on the proverbial “patience of Job” versus the actual biblical portrait, see Zuckerman, Job the Silent, 13–15.

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rewarded; with the close bond between act and consequence suddenly broken, Job identifies the cause of his suffering as divine injustice and presents his new perception of God in a series of remarkable speeches, in which he variously characterizes God as a thief, a criminal, a violent warrior, a predator, and a murderer.62 He bemoans God’s elusiveness and the futility of arguing with him or asserting one’s rights.63 He questions the Creator’s very order, charging that his creation lacks meaning, order, or a coherent moral pattern.64 His persistent efforts to defend his virtue before God demonstrate his need to discern order and causality in an unjust universe.65 Finally, Job issues a direct challenge to God: “Oh, that I had one to hear me! (Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!)” ( Job 31:35). Like Job before him, the pre-flood Evgenii is portrayed as a submissive member of his creator’s order—hardly a candidate for rebellion. In part II of the poem we learn that Evgenii, driven mad by his loss of Parasha, has been wandering the streets of Petersburg since the floodwaters receded nearly a year before. Like Job, Evgenii spends the transitional period between passivity and revolt in silence: “of horrid thoughts / Speechlessly full, he roved about” (145– 46). In each poem, the portrait of the ruined hero highlights his debasement and ostracism from the social order he once embraced: the children’s treatment of the mad Evgenii—“Soon to the world he / Became a stranger [. . .] Wicked children / Threw stones after him” (146)—echoes Job’s ancient complaint, “‘They abhor me, they keep aloof from me; they do not hesitate to spit at the sight of me’” ( Job 30:10). 62 “‘He snatches away; who can stop him? Who will say to him, “What are you doing?”’” ( Job 9:12); “‘The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the eyes of its judges—if it is not he, who then is it?’” ( Job 9:24); “‘He bursts upon me again and again; he rushes at me like a warrior’” ( Job 16:14); “‘Bold as a lion you hunt me; you repeat your exploits against me’” ( Job 10:16); “‘See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face’” ( Job 13:15). 63 “‘Even when I cry out, “Violence!” I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice. He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass’” ( Job 19:7–8); “‘If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him’” ( Job 23:8); “‘If I summoned him and he answered me, I do not believe that he would listen to my voice. For he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause’” (9:16–17). 64 “‘It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked’” (9:22); “‘Why do the wicked live on, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?’” (21:7). 65 “‘I would give him an account of all my steps; like a prince I would approach him’” (31:37).

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One night Evgenii wakes up on Senate Square, the site of his first encounter with Peter. His abrupt transition into an active state is highlighted g­ rammatically with a string of perfective verbs: wakened, jumped up, rose, took off (prosnulsia, vskochil, vstal, poshel [146–47]). As Evgenii awakens, the hostile Neva is depicted as a fellow target of Peter’s subjugating tendencies, her course again corseted in granite; her waves grumble and beat against the smooth steps of the embankment “Like a petitioner at the door / Of unheeding magistrates” (146). The mounting rain and wind recreate the flood conditions of the previous year, and the memory of that event sharpens the clerk’s consciousness: “Fearfully clear / His thoughts became” (147). Finally back at the scene of his loss, Evgenii recognizes both the site of the flood and the terrible kumir (idol) on ­horseback.66 His thoughts drawing into focus, Evgenii suddenly identifies his foe—and the enemy of nature more generally—in the wonderworking tsar: “He recognized [. . .] Him by whose fateful will / The city by the sea was founded” (147). Evgenii shudders, as though finally connecting Peter, the conquered Neva, the flood, and his own terrible loss. Although it is not stated explicitly, Evgenii appears to grow conscious here that the creator-tsar is to blame for his ­suffering.67 The contemptuous epithet he hurls at the statue—“All right then, ­wonderworking builder!” (148)—refers both to Peter’s creation (chudo [wonder, miracle]) and to the solitary role he played in establishing the new Russian order (stroitel’, tvor- [builder, create]). Evgenii’s physical opposition to and sarcastic invocation of the tsar reveal his newfound contempt for the Petrine idea, his sudden grasp of the price in human suffering demanded by Peter’s world building. Finally, he issues his own open challenge to Peter: “Just you wait!” (148). The poem’s Old Testament subtext sheds light on this climactic outburst, with Job’s lengthy diatribe providing broader context for Evgenii’s c­ omparatively brief threat. Where Evgenii flings a mere two lines at his creator, Job fills 66 As Bethea notes, Pushkin captures the entire, anti-Christian orientation of Peter’s city and worldview in the loaded word kumir, with its implications of an “old, pre-Christian, pagan” idol. See David Bethea, “Stabat Pater: Revisiting the ‘Monumental’ in Peter, Petersburg, Pushkin,” Zapiski Russkoi akademicheskoi gruppy v SShA/Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA 33 (2004): 10–11. 67 Rosenshield reads this passage from Evgenii’s point of view, as a “transcription of Evgenii’s unexpressed thoughts” as he realizes that Peter alone is responsible for his fate, as well as for that of Russia (Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 111).

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twenty chapters with his various curses, accusations, and demands to God; yet if Job’s indictment of God and his “order” indeed served as a blueprint for Evgenii’s confrontation with Peter, then the five words voiced by the clerk represent a far more detailed critique of Peter’s creation than would first appear. Enriched by this ancient subtext, in fact, Evgenii’s rebellion—often read as a political stand against despotism, the disenfranchised little man rising futilely against the powerful state68—becomes something akin to ­theomachy. Evgenii’s sudden insight into the human cost of the Petrine vision bares to him the lack of a moral pattern at the heart of the tsar’s wondrous creation. His defiant outburst represents his recognition and charge of divine injustice, just as Job had ­questioned the legitimacy of God’s order in his own speeches. By naming Peter the sole architect (stroitel’) of the artificial, doomed city, Evgenii essentially accuses him of criminal hubris: the tsar’s willful ­subjugation of nature and imposition of reason and order (stroi) have ­ultimately unleashed chaos, leaving his city threatened by the very forces it once stood as a monument against. Essentially, Evgenii’s sarcastic allegations of wonderworking (after all, a real chudo can be accomplished only by the gods) call Peter’s assumed divinity into question.

God’s Response Toward the end of Job, following the revolt and accusations of a once-loyal subject, the creator descends to face his confronter. Scholars have long been divided in their interpretation of God’s speech to Job from the whirlwind. Some claim that, by deigning to descend from heaven to address the accusations of a single member of his creation, God demonstrates divine compassion and care for those who suffer.69 Many, however, see the Lord’s speeches as “an 68 Several critics, for example, have discerned in the poem an allegorical commentary on the Decembrist uprising. See D. D. Blagoi, Sotsiologiia tvorchestva Pushkina: Etiudy (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 308–28; and I. B. Borev, Iskusstvo interpretatsii i otsenki: Opyt prochteniia Mednogo vsadnika (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981), 282–92. An awareness of the Joban parallels enhances our understanding and appreciation of the disenfranchised Evgenii’s conflict with the state, as embodied in the statue. 69 For a summary of scholars who discern in God’s appearance a show of compassion toward His tormented creature, see Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom in Revolt: Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1991), 197n1.

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intimidating display of power,” empty bluster signaling a blunt refusal to engage His accuser on the pivotal issues of cosmic causality and justice.70 To these critics, the voice from the whirlwind “categorically refuses Job’s right to q­ uestion the divine sovereignty,” effectively neutralizing the subversive power of his words.71 Those who focus on the content of God’s speech, rather than on the theophanic event itself, discern in it a poetic apologia, in which He defends His Cosmos against charges of chaos, and Himself against Job’s accusations of ­criminality.72 God’s theological self-defense hinges on His role as designer of a stable, well-ordered universe. His thundering defense emphasizes the ­limitations of Job’s knowledge, while asserting His own responsibility to protect the cosmos by, for instance, holding back the waters of chaos: with its tendency to relapse into disorder, the sea must be confined by walls and limited by divine decree.73 Such limits, God implies, are hardly an unfair imposition on the i­nnocent, as Job alleges, but exist “for the good of the cosmic community.”74 The distinctions among these various readings hold enormous i­mplications for the overall interpretation of the poem and its central theological problem. Job is widely considered the preeminent biblical inquiry into the question of theodicy, or man’s attempt to reconcile a benevolent God with the existence of evil. Job’s primary criticism of God’s order lies in its incomprehensibility, its seeming lack of connection between cause and effect—his piety and the resulting punishment. Reason is hidden from man, leaving the benevolence of the Creator and the meaning of His cosmos unfathomable. God’s blistering address to Job from the whirlwind provides two plausible, though conflicting, responses to the issue: He either rebuffs human concern for theodicy, bluntly 70 Norman C. Habel, “In Defense of God the Sage,” in The Voice from the Whirlwhind: Interpreting the Book of Job, ed. Leo G. Perdue and W. Clark Gilpin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 33. 71 Richard G. Walsh, Reading the Bible: An Introduction (Notre Dame: Cross Cultural ­Publications, 1997), 340; Rene Girard, Job, the Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 143. 72 See Habel, “In Defense of God the Sage,” 35. 73 “‘Or who shut in the sea with doors [. . .] and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?’” (38:8, 11); “‘Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives [. . .] to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?’” (38:25–27). 74 Habel, “In Defense of God the Sage,” 35.

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putting his insignificant subject back in his place, or, by deigning to address his tormented creature, the Creator commits an act of compassionate abasement. One reading resolves the problem of theodicy with the dismissive explanation that human suffering is trivial and irrelevant, while the alternative offers ­assurance that suffering is an integral part of a divine, though unknowable, cosmic design. In Pushkin’s poem, the Horseman’s clangorous pursuit of Evgenii parallels God’s thunderous appearance from the whirlwind; his response to his ­questioning subject, though wordless, seems designed to be as ambiguous and multivalent as God’s speeches to Job.75 In this poem, too, critics have discerned several alternative yet equally defensible readings of the Horseman’s descent. In one common interpretation, the mighty tsar effectively intimidates his ­rebellious subject into submission, forever silencing his revolt. According to this reading of the poem, individual protest is futile, subject to official ­punishment at the pitiless hands of Peter, the incarnation of historical ­necessity; in the words of Lednicki, “The doubts of individuals, their happiness, even their lives must be sacrificed to the invincible will and fatal greatness of the state.”76 Another interpretive line attempts to address why the Horseman would descend to pursue such an “insignificant” madman as Evgenii, whose incoherent, ­seemingly harmless threats should hardly be cause for such alarm. These critics remark that, by descending from his rock to chase a common subject through the streets of Petersburg, he betrays a very ungodlike vulnerability, as if afraid of how Evgenii’s revolt could upset the order of his creation.77 Indeed, during both the creation and flood scenes of Bronze Horseman, the tsar is portrayed as motionless: “Stood he, of lofty musings full, / And gazed afar” (135); “Over the tumultuous Neva / Stands with outstretched hand / The Idol on his bronze steed” (142). Now, as though recognizing Evgenii’s words as potentially more 75 It is worth recalling that in the post-Enlightenment version of Job familiar to Pushkin, ­scholarly and artistic attention to the poem had drifted from the exemplary fortitude of the hero to the divine qualities conveyed in God’s speech; emphasis was placed as much on the formidability or perceived limitations of the Creator as on the virtues of his creature (Pardes, “Job’s Leviathan,” 239). 76 Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, 81. 77 As Bethea writes, “the most significant fact about the climax of Puškin’s poem is not that the hero perishes [. . .] but that the ‘unshakeable’ statue is provoked into motion by the words, the ‘Just you wait!’ (Uzho tebe) of the little man” (“Role of the Eques,” 117).

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destructive than even the flood itself, the statue is provoked into action for the only time in the poem: “Behind him the Bronze Horseman / Was galloping with heavy clatter” (148).78 Like the theophanic whirlwind of Job, the Horseman’s pursuit of Evgenii may be read as Peter’s attempt to defend his order against his subject’s ­indictment. In this reading, Peter recognizes the potentially destabilizing power contained in the words uttered by his rebellious subject.79 Evgenii, circling the statue’s feet like the long-abated floodwaters of the uncontainable Neva, represents a disruptive force that must be channeled and subdued, like the chaotic sea in God’s defense to Job. Peter’s physical containment of Evgenii’s movements that night embodies the tsar’s self-defense: he must control unruly elements in the interest of the state. As God’s speech from the whirlwind revealed to Job, individual loss is justified by an overarching order, imperceptible to men. It must be noted, however, that Peter’s is a physically threatening response, as opposed to the elaborate verbal self-defense provided by God. The tsar’s shift from creative Word (prologue) to wordless clangor suggests his 78 The theme of order and individual rebellion in the two poems is further accentuated by the poets’ focus on the creative/repressive hands of the creator. Job elaborates the dual function of God’s hands, which once built the world and now guard against any uprising or threat to his order. Job refers explicitly to the seemingly contradictory functions of the divine hands, at once creative and destructive: “‘Your hands fashioned and made me; and now you turn and destroy me’” ( Job 10:8). This biblical background may help explain Pushkin’s poetic fixation on the outstretched hand of the Falconet monument, a sculptural detail that makes a striking appearance at three critical moments of the text: the flood, the confrontation, and the midnight pursuit. As in Job, the extended arm of the Horseman must be read as both the creative instrument of a wonderworking builder and as an oppressive defense against disruption; the same hand that fashioned the glorious order of the prologue now stretches forth to hold threatening forces at bay. As Bethea writes, the monarch’s outstretched arm conveys the ambiguity of his reign: it is both the “main protectrice” conceived by Falconet and the “menacing,” “threatening” instrument in the drafts to Pushkin’s poem (“Stabat Pater,” 9). Like Job before him, Evgenii mutinies against his creator/oppressor, whose outstretched hand offers both protection to that which he created and a stern warning against rebellion. (For a brief treatment of this hand motif across Job and The Bronze Horseman, see Tarkhov, “Povest’ o peterburgskom Iove,” 63.) 79 Although Pushkin provides some textual indication that the Horseman’s fatal pursuit is merely the hallucination of a poor madman (repeating the epithet bezumets bednyi twice in the confrontation passage), the clerk’s verbal challenge, its identification with Job’s ancient curse, and its consequent potential for provocation are all nonetheless “real” within the world of the poem; by revealing the biblical roots of his hero’s protest, Pushkin charges the resulting clash with mythic consequence, regardless of its provenance in madness or reality.

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u­ ltimate inability to justify Evgenii’s loss in terms of state interests; this linguistic breakdown calls Peter’s “divinity” further into question.80 The first part of The Bronze Horseman concludes with a suggestion of the creator’s whimsical indifference to his creation: “Or is all our / Very life nothing but an idle dream, / heaven’s mockery of earth?” (142). The ­narrator’s ­rhetorical question corresponds to similar charges raised by Job throughout his poem: “‘When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the ­innocent’” ( Job 9:23). In Pushkin’s poem, however, the central theodicy is left essentially unanswered: the Horseman’s deafening pursuit of Evgenii, the poem’s climactic assertion of the creator’s dominion over his creation, demonstrates only the divine prohibition against a subject’s questioning His order. By contrast with the blustering whirlwind, Tsar Peter attempts to silence and contain his unruly subject by mute, brute force; it would appear that questions of theodicy are unwelcome in a city whose creator is not God but rather a tyrannical Idol.

Submission Although God’s speeches from the whirlwind refuse to offer any immediate consolation for Job’s suffering, Job repents following the theophanic appearance. He professes to accept the limits of human knowledge and declares an end to his verbal assault against God;81 in the epilogue, God rewards his servant by restoring his property, family, and health twofold. In contrast to the previous sections of the poem, Evgenii’s capitulation following his confrontation with Peter represents a decisive departure from the Joban blueprint; the divergence is especially striking in comparison with the clear textual parallelism seen in the other major events of the poem. In the most obvious Pushkinian revision, whereas Job regains his lost property following his submission before God, Evgenii is destroyed rather than rewarded. Tarkhov’s original article focuses 80 As Vogler points out, the distinction between the omnipotent Word of God and the inadequate human tongue had been a primary characteristic of the eighteenth-century reading of the Job story. Peter’s wordless, almost animalistic response to his own Job recollects and intensifies this divide between the earthly and the divine (“Eighteenth-Century Logology,” 34). 81 “‘Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know’” ( Job 42:3); “‘I lay my hand on my mouth’” ( Job 40:4).

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almost exclusively on this episode and its illumination through a comparative reading with the Joban text. In Tarkhov’s ingenious reading, Evgenii presses his hand to his heart to subdue the passions that prompted his mutiny (“To his heart / He would hastily press his hand, / as if soothing its agony” [148]), just as the Bronze Horseman’s hand stretches out to subdue disruptive elements and protect his creation. Whereas Job had signaled an end to his verbal feud with God by covering his mouth with his hand (“‘I lay my hand on my mouth’” [ Job 40:4]), Evgenii’s gesture reveals that his heart is still tortured by loss. To Tarkhov, this act of seeming repentance does not signify a renunciation of his earlier rebellion but rather the hero’s effort to control his still-raging emotions, representing Evgenii’s main point of divergence from his Old Testament ­prototype.82 Furthermore, the confusion (smiatenie) etched on Evgenii’s face when he encounters the Bronze Horseman recalls the disorder of his mind following the flood’s devastation and retreat (“his troubled mind / Against those dreadful shocks / Did not stand up” [145]), also indicating the persistence of those very emotions that originally led him to revolt. Ultimately, Evgenii dies young, mad and penniless, his fate contrasting starkly with Job’s long, prosperous life. Tarkhov’s reading would suggest that the clerk is not recompensed because he does not truly repent, as his precursor Job had. The poem’s Petersburg context, however, suggests a darker, and equally plausible, explanation for this divergence from the Joban template. Despite the luminous creation scene of the prologue, Peter is not divine, and Petersburg is far from God’s creation; the rebel Evgenii meets his sad end precisely because Peter is merely an impostor-God. This sense of Peter as kumir, his dazzling creation merely a fleeting suspension of chaos,83 is strengthened by the implications in the poem’s epilogue that the old, pre-Petrine order is reasserting itself. The second section of this chapter will explore this idea of Peter as a false creator, whose cosmos is shaken to its foundations by the words of his puniest creature.

82 For details of this rereading of Evgenii’s submission (smirenie), see Tarkhov, “Povest’ o peterburgskom Iove,” 63–64. 83 For more on the cosmos/chaos imbalance in Petersburg, see Toporov, PTRL. As he writes, “The history of Petersburg is thought of as closed; it is nothing more than a temporary break in the chaos” (41).

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“Let that day be darkness!” Performative Language in Job and The Bronze Horseman How could the dark mutterings of a mad subject pose a threat to Peter’s dazzling creation? To answer this question, it is necessary to examine the role of language in both Pushkin’s tale and its ancient predecessor. In the Book of Job, as in the Bible more generally, the Word (Logos, the divine agent of creation) holds a performative power: speaking engenders action. The preeminent Old ­Testament instance of Logos occurs in the Book of Genesis, in which God speaks each element of creation into being, naming its proper place and ­function in his order. In the prologue to the Book of Job, God’s verbal decree determines human destiny and the natural order: “The Lord said to Satan, ‘Very well, all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!’ So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord” ( Job 1:12). After he has been afflicted with sores, Job’s wife urges him to “‘Curse God, and die’” ( Job 2:9), indicating the terrible potency such blasphemous speech was assumed to hold in the contemporary worldview. Job’s revolt against his creator is correspondingly staged by means of the Word. His transformation in the third chapter from “God-fearing” servant to angry rebel is represented verbally: he spends a week in silence, as though willfully countering God’s seven-day act of creation-by-Word, finally breaking his silence with a curse: “After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth” (3:1).84 He next expands his verbal assault to include the moments of his conception and birth: “‘Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, “A man-child is conceived”’” ( Job 3:3). In the speech that follows, Job lyrically and systematically subverts God’s careful arrangement of the cosmos: he curses day and night and inverts light and dark (“‘May God above not seek [that day], or light shine on it’” [3:4]); he disrupts time and the order of days (“‘let [that day] not rejoice among the days of the year’” [3:6]); and, finally, he annuls the boundary between life and death itself (“‘Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?’” [3:11]). His curse reaches its profane 84 In antiquity, the act of cursing or blessing was thought to assume real, creative power under the proper conditions. See Carol A. Newsom, “The Book of Job: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Robert Doran et al. (Nashvville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 4:366.

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apogee with an explicit inversion of creation language: “‘Let that day be ­darkness!’” ( Job 3:4).85 This startling expletive, designed to drag God’s bright creation back into the darkness of oblivion, has been described by one Job scholar as a “counter cosmic incantation.”86 In the verbally charged atmosphere of the Old Testament, by reversing and destabilizing the creation narrative articulated in Genesis, Job threatens to overturn and destroy God’s created order by means of his subversive words. Throughout the dialogues, Job frequently indicates his awareness of the importance of words. His speech is punctuated with constant exhortations to his friends to “‘Listen carefully to my words”’ (13:17). When he taunts God, asking, “‘Am I the sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me?’” (7:12), his rhetorical challenge indicates his knowledge that words possess enough power to disrupt the very order of the cosmos. He expresses regret that his spoken words do not possess sufficient power or endurance to provoke the divine response he seeks, proclaiming, “‘O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!’” (19:23). Following his fateful curse, Job continues to question and challenge the accepted worldview; he goes on to express his concerns for theodicy, demanding to know the reasons and meaning behind his suffering. In the climactic moment of his final speech, when Job defies God to descend and present his defense (“‘O that I had one to hear me! (Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!) O that I had the indictment written by my adversary!’” [31:35]), his exhortation is formulated in the codified, binding 85 The French translation that Pushkin used (“Que ce jour se change en ténèbres”) renders the comparison with Genesis 1:3 (“Que la lumière soit faite”) just as clearly. Interestingly, while the modern Russian translation (“Den’ tot da budet t’moiu”) makes the Genesis connection explicit, the OCS, which Pushkin may have consulted, defangs Job’s curse by swapping out day for night (“ta nosh’ budi tma”), as though inverting divine speech and casting the Lord’s light back into darkness might be too seditious an act for the translator(s) to repeat. It is worth noting that the Hebrew yom (day) is translated as the expected den’ through the remainder of Job 3, as well as in Genesis; the day/night substitution applies only to the curse in 3:4, suggesting that this is no misinterpretation on the part of the translator but a deliberate revision of the verse. Whatever the scribe’s reasoning, as the power of Job’s expletive clearly derives from his radical reversal of day into darkness, the OCS version renders the intended anticreation imagery of the curse senseless. 86 Michael Fishbane, “The Book of Job and Inner-biblical Discourse,” in Voice from the ­Whirlwind, 43.

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language of the Law. If Job’s initial curse was designed to drag God’s bright creation back into the darkness of oblivion, his final taunt endeavors to force God down from his heavenly perch to hear and respond to his case. In the context of ancient thought, Job’s curses, challenges, and indictments function as performatives, deliberately calculated to unleash the dark forces of chaos against the light of God’s order.87 Following Job’s attempts “to ­deconstruct the metaphor of creation by word with his own linguistic assault,” God is obliged to restabilize the language of cosmos: in self-justifying speeches from the whirlwind, He conjures His feats of cosmic construction, His defense of creation against the wild waters of chaos.88 He refers in his sermon to the Earth, sea, heavens, day and night, and various animals of the earth, air, and sea; the resulting panorama presents a virtual catalogue of creation, clearly intended to echo His originating act of Genesis. God flaunts to his servant that he controls the chaotic waters by voice alone: “‘Or who shut in the sea with doors [. . .] and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?’” God then accuses Job of “darkening his counsel” with “words without knowledge.” These words, he implies, are not simply ignorant; rather, Job’s various curses, indictments, and challenges represent a subversive, destructive anti-Logos that threaten God’s order with chaos. In the world of The Bronze Horseman, language, rooted in the divine Logos, becomes similarly performative. As Rosenshield notes, paraphrasing John 1, “at the beginning, the Word is with Peter, and the creation of the city and the empire emanate from that Word.”89 Indeed, the ode to Peter in the prologue presents the formation of Petersburg in language that strongly echoes God’s verbal creation of the world: Peter’s “Let there be a city here” (135)90 carries undeniable traces of God’s “Let there be light.” 87 Contemporary studies of sacred texts and prayer have been increasingly informed by J. L. Austin’s categories of performative language, which stresses the ability of words and verbal formulae to perform or enact the speaker’s wishes. For more on the performativity of ancient language in the biblical context, see Grant R. Osborne, The Hermenuetical Spiral: A Complete Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 119–21. 88 Perdue, Wisdom in Revolt, 204. See also Tryggve N. B. Mettinger, “The God of Job: Avenger, Tyrant, or Victor?” in Voice from the Whirlwind, 45. 89 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 117. 90 “Zdes’ budet gorod zalozhen.” Originally reported to be “Zdes’ byt’ gorodu,” heightening the correspondence with the OCS “da budet svet.”

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As Pushkin undoubtedly knew, the sacralization of monarchy was a commonplace of the odic tradition.91 The poetic exaltation of royalty was ­realized primarily on the religious plane,92 and it became common in Russian panegyric literature of the Enlightenment age to replace the name of a monarch with that of a deity. The metaphor of tsar as creator-God was particularly well developed in poems eulogizing Peter I:93 Trediakovsky dubbed Peter the creator (sotvoritel’) of his state, employing a word commonly associated with the God of Genesis; Lomonosov proclaimed Peter Russia’s God; and Derzhavin mused about whether the sovereign might actually be God himself, descended from heaven.94 Beyond the poetic realm, too, Peter was hailed by official eulogists as the God of the new empire. At a 1721 ceremony marking Russia’s transformation from tsarstvo into empire, Count G. I. Golovkin, a chancellor and close member of Peter’s entourage, was chosen to present the tsar with his new titles of emperor (imperator) and Father of the Fatherland (Otets otechestva). In his oratory, Golovkin hailed Peter for leading his metaphorical children out of the darkness (t’ma) of ignorance into the glory of the world (svet), and from nonbeing into being (iz nebytiia v bytie).95 Zhivov interprets these famous lines within the broader context of eighteenth-century royal appropriations of the sacred, noting that the formula “from nonbeing into being” echoes what he terms the most important prayer of the Orthodox Liturgy, the Trisagion Prayer: “Holy God . . . who has brought all things from nonbeing into being” (Bozhe

91 For a comprehensive discussion of the Baroque tradition of deifying royal authority, its crescendo under Peter I, and its decline in the nineteenth century, see V. M. Zhivov and B. A. Uspenskii, “Tsar’ i bog: Semioticheskie aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii,” in Iazyki kul’tury i problemy perevodimosti, ed. B. A. Uspenskii (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 47–153; and Stephen Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 92 Zhivov and Uspenskii, “Tsar’ i bog,” 121. 93 Baehr, Paradise Myth, 42. For a broader discussion of the poetic and political image of Peter I in the age of Enlightenment, see Riasanovsky, Image of Peter the Great, 3–85. 94 “The new creator of his state,” in V. K. Trediakovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), 58; “Your God, your God he was, O Russia,” Lomonosov, PSS, 8:109; “Was it God who descended from heaven in his shape?,” quoted in Zhivov and Uspenskii, “Tsar’ i bog,” 130. 95 Quoted in V. M. Zhivov, “Kul’turnye reformy v sisteme preobrazovanii Petra I,” in Iz istorii russkoi kul’tury, ed. A. D. Koshelev et al. (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1996), 550.

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sviatyi . . . Izhe ot nebytiia vo ezhe byti prevedyi vsiacheskaia).96 The amateur historian P. N. Krekshin, who served under Peter and wrote one of his first ­biographies, follows suit, addressing the object of his devotion as “our father, Peter the Great [. . . who] led us from nonexistence into existence.”97 His fawning declaration—an unmistakable synthesis of the Lord’s Prayer and the Trisagion Prayer—confirms Zhivov’s characterization of Peter and his people exploiting well-known Orthodox texts to appropriate the power of the heavenly Father for the father of the fatherland.98 Pushkin was certainly aware of the conventional association between the Petrine revolution and the Old Testament creation of the world—both poetical and political—when he penned the prologue to his Petersburg tale. He ­carefully reproduces the stages of the divine Creation in Peter’s own act of world ­formation, both drawing to a close and putting a twist on the eighteenth-­ century panegyric tradition. On the first day, both Peter and God appear over a formless, unarticulated, and dark landscape to speak a new world into creation; where God calls forth life-giving light, Peter thinks forth his resplendent city.99 Over the next two days, God divides sky from water and water from dry land, allowing heaven to rise and vegetation to creep over the land. Peter, in turn, separates the formerly undifferentiated waters of the sea, mists, and marshy banks with a “window” to Europe; he corrects and contains the course of the river, enclosing it in granite embankments; bridges appear, separating the wet from dry land; buildings rise on the once-sodden shore, and gardens flourish on the newly revealed islands.   96 Zhivov, “Kul’turnye reformy,” 550. Compare Zhivov’s interpretation to that of Uspenskii, who views the renaming of the tsar as part of Peter’s general cultural reorientation, and claims that “Adopting the imperial title was a cultural act, rather than a religious one”. See B. A. Uspenskii, Tsar’ i imperator: Pomazanie na tsarstvo i semantika monarshikh titulov (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 48.   97 Quoted in Zhivov and Uspenskii, “Tsar’ i bog,” 90.   98 Zhivov, “Kul’turnye reformy,” 550   99 It is important to recall that the poem does not offer an assessment of the historical Peter; rather, it is concerned with his legacy, as exemplified in monument, city, and empire, and with his image, as preserved in the popular imagination (see Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 222n6). In literal terms, Peter ordered a city to be built on the swamp, and a new capital was created according to his plan. On the mythopoetic level, however (and this is the level on which Pushkin treats his subject), tsar is elevated to divinity, a creator-god possessed of a creative impulse whose very articulation in thought (“I dumal on”) appears to bring it to fruition in the very next stanza.

Cursing at the Whirlwind

The pronounced parallels with Genesis break down on the fourth day, when God separates day from night, creating two great lights to rule over them. In contrast, day and night never fully separate in Peter’s new city, and there are no “great lights,” save the shining Admiralty needle; the same half-light that reigned in the precosmogonic murk later features in the narrator’s extended paean to his city’s eerily bright, though moonless, night.100 This abrupt ­deviation from the biblical template—the peculiarly Petersburgian mingling of day and night—suggests the limits of Peter’s power: this godlike tsar is incapable of teasing light from darkness (which is, after all, God’s quintessential act in Gen. 1:3). The continued mingling of darkness with light, day with night, hints at the unnatural (and unholy) forces that lurk beneath the city’s brilliant exterior. This out-of-balance play of dark and light ties back to the Job text, as well. In his speeches, Job accuses God of fostering darkness, impeding enlightenment: “‘He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths’” (19:8); “‘He strips understanding from the leaders of the earth, and makes them wander in a pathless waste. They grope in the dark without light; he makes them stagger like a drunkard’” (12:24–25). The poetry of Job thus relies on the natural opposition of light and darkness to express one of its major themes: man’s impulse toward knowledge, and his rage at his incapacity to discern the divine order. By contrast, in Peter’s creation, light and dark are out of balance; and how can there be enlightenment, humanly accessible or not, if the Creator himself is not in control of the light? Next, in striking contrast to God’s creation of man in his own image at the climactic point in Genesis, Peter’s creation seems to actually displace and fragment its human inhabitants: the lonely Finn, present at the city’s chaotic beginnings, is soon replaced by elegant crowds of buildings. The only living creatures to appear in the prologue, nearly lost among the narrator’s radiant description of the capital’s architecture, ships, waters, and “deserted streets,” emerge in abstracted fragments: “girlish faces,” “voices at a ball,” and a “bachelor’s 100 “And forest, alien to the rays / Of the fog-enshrouded sun / Murmured all about” (135); “Of your pensive nights / The translucent twilight, the moonless sheen, when in my room I / Write or read without a lamp, / And clear there show the slumbering expanses / Of deserted streets, and brightly shines / The needle of the Admiralty spire, / And barring the gloom of night / From the golden skies, / One dawn hurries to relieve the other, / Allowing half-anhour to night” (136).

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feast” (137) give only metonymic glimpses of the city’s human element. Even beyond the prologue, the population of Peter’s glorious new capital seems strangely sparse; other than the crowds that throng the Neva after the flood, the streets of the city stand empty. These desolate streets, drained of all life, read as a fulfillment of the city’s prophetic curse of emptiness (generally attributed to Peter the Great’s first wife Evdokiia Lopukhina, but widely ­circulated among Old Believers in Peter’s lifetime): “Petersburg will be empty.” Altogether, these fragmented bodies and deserted squares reveal the limits of Peter’s power: he might attempt to tame the waters, but he cannot create man.101 The account of this latter-day genesis closes with the creator’s rest (“Vechnyi son Petra” [137]); although Peter has failed to live up to his divine precursor, he concludes his own act of creation with an eternal (though uneasy) sleep. When read against its Old Testament model, then, the overall impression of Pushkin’s prologue is one of a stunted or incomplete Creation narrative. Behind the brilliant façade and dazzling light of Peter’s capital, we now see, lie the contours of a distorted, unnatural genesis. In fact, it is the unnatural, unbounded light itself that betrays the artifice and perversion of Peter’s ­undertaking. Critics generally see an undermining of the Petersburg creation myth beginning in Part I, as the shadows and flood of the povest’ provide a dark counterpoint to the radiant portrait on display in the prologue. A close ­comparison of the two creation myths, however, allows us to see that the ­deflation of the Petrine vision begins in the luminous prologue itself, with Peter’s deformed act of genesis. Pushkin’s prologue ultimately presents a ­challenge to the p­ anegyric culture that depicted Peter as God; Baehr’s apt ­characterization of the full poem as an “‘anti-ode’ to a pretender-god” applies equally well to the prologue alone.102 During the flood, the stages of creation described in the prologue are systematically undone. Part I opens with November breathing its autumn chill “Over darkened Petrograd” (138), immediately establishing a counterpoint to the prologue’s abundance of light. The darkness of the opening scene, richly expressed in the opening passage (gloomy, autumnal, late, dark [omrachennym, osennim, pozdno, temno]), effectively annuls the principal act of creation (Peter’s 101 Note that even Evgenii’s name, with its connotations of birth and genesis, presents an affront to this false Creator-god. 102 Baehr, Paradise Myth, 165.

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transformed “let there be light”), a trend that will continue through the first part of the povest’. In the gloom, the Neva begins to thrash against the granite walls fashioned for her in the prologue (“Splashing with noisy wave / Against the edges of her neat embankment / Neva was tossing” [138]), threatening to overwhelm Peter’s tight control over his city’s waters. When rain pounds against Evgenii’s window, the image evokes the historic window of the prologue, which separated and contained the chaotic waters of the swamp. The strict division between wet and dry ground, so primary in the creation narrative, begins to dissolve with the rising of the river and the raising of the bridges.103 The floodwaters push the created order back into oblivion, as the orderly, intentional streets of Petersburg are submerged beneath the chaotic waves; wherever the unruly river flows, Peter’s creation is brusquely emptied out: “Before her / All fled, all about / Was suddenly deserted” (140).104 Interestingly, as a pale dawn breaks through the waning darkness following the flood (“The foul night’s fog thinning, / And pale day already drawing up . . . / That day of horror!” [140]), we see that day and night are now divided, albeit thinly, attenuating the perpetual light of Peter’s aberrant creation. This is the only place where conditions in Pushkin’s Petersburg correspond to the “natural” order: day has begun to pull itself away from the night, and the city teems with people: “Poutru nad ee bregami / Tesnilsia kuchami narod” (140). The unruly 103 The subsequent destruction of two laden Petersburg symbols, the window and the bridge, signifies the definitive primordial reintegration of the waters with the land: windows, so fundamental to the myth of Petersburg’s origins, reappear as unmoored boats smash their panes (“Boats / Swooping, smash panes with their sterns”), allowing the voracious waves to scramble through (“angry waves, / Like thieves, climb through the windows” [140]). The window, the prologue’s analogue of heaven, separating and containing the waters, has now shattered, allowing the waters to collide. Next the pontoon bridges, which once elevated the dry lands from the teeming waters of the prologue, now float along the streets: “Bridges carried away by the storm [. . .] Float down the streets!” (141). With the destruction of these two emblems of order, the rain, river, sea, and marshy banks are once again united, as they were in the primordial chaos of the pre-Petrine prologue. 104 This wholesale destruction undoes every aspect of Peter’s cosmos. Along with the disordered order and the reunion of land and water, there is a distinct, apocalyptic hint of the reversal of life and death: alongside the logs and roofs that are carried away by the waves, “Coffins from the flooded cemetery / Float down the streets!” (141). This image of the dead, disturbed from their rest and repopulating the city’s streets, calls to mind Toporov’s characterization of Petersburg as a nekropol’, or city of the dead. His statistics paint a disturbing picture of the capital as a “death factory” (Peterburgskii tekst, 32), an enormous facility for the production and processing of dead bodies.

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elements appear to have swept away Peter’s unnatural order and reinstated something closer to God’s. The reversal of creation now complete, the city squares and streets return to their watery origins (“The squares lay like lakes, / And into them like broad rivers / Debouched the streets” [141]), leaving the palace like an isolated isle among the waves (“The palace / Seemed a lonely island”). Tsar Alexander I’s resigned acknowledgment of powerlessness before the elements (“‘Against God’s element / There is no prevailing for tsars’” [141]) grants ascendancy to the prologue’s subjugated elements (pobezhdennaia stikhiia), once conquered by Peter’s unholy Logos. The stages of creation so carefully reproduced in the introduction have now effectively dissolved in the chaotic floodwaters. By erasing each of Peter’s meticulously wrought chapters of creation in turn, the rebellious elements of the flood have effectively ­destabilized that which he produced, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, Pushkin associates his unlikely rebel Evgenii so strongly with the river that his one-man revolt will become linked by association with the unraveling of Peter’s Word. Throughout the poem, the Neva is “anthropomorphized as Evgenii,” as Rosenshield remarks, until the two become “linguistically and thematically aligned”:105 both the river and Evgenii represent subjugated elements in Peter’s new Russian order; while both initially “accept” their limits and captivity, they will later rise up in mutiny against their common captor. The following ­discussion will extend Rosenshield’s astute observation into the realm of language and rebellion. The Neva runs wild through the dark, desolate space of the prologue; hemmed in by Peter and transformed into an essential military and commercial artery of the city, the river eagerly performs and exults in her new role in the functioning of the empire: “having broken her blue ice, / Neva bears it to the seas, / and scenting vernal days, exults” (137). At the end of the prologue, however, the narrator warns the elements to reconcile themselves with their subjugation (“Would that the Finnish seas forget / Their enmity and ancient bondage” [137]). The narrator’s forewarning suggests that the river’s— and, by extension, the socially marginalized Evgenii’s—ancient spite (zloba) presents a potential disturbance (trevoga) to the order of Peter’s capital: “And trouble not with empty spite / Peter’s eternal slumber” (137).

105 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 137.

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At the opening of part I, the river writhes against her granite confines, prefiguring her imminent revolt (“Neva was tossing like an invalid / In her unrestful bed” [138]); meanwhile, Evgenii lies in his own bed, tossing in turmoil (“v volnen’i” [139]). Over the course of their respective rebellions, each will progress from a horizontal to a vertical state, as they literally rise up against captivity: the river rises and “stands” over the islands (“The waves rose up there and raged” [142]), just as, a year later, Evgenii will awaken, spring to his feet, and stand just before his own revolt (“On vstal” [147]; all emphases in this section are my own). The defiance of each is associated with the root serd-, or heart: the rain beats angrily at the window (“Angrily the rain beat on the window” [Serdito bilsia dozhd’ v okno (138)]) in the opening scene, just as Evgenii gives a heartfelt sigh (vzdokhnul serdechno [139]) and dreams about his future with Parasha. Later on, his own rebellion will likewise be ignited in the heart: “Flame coursed through his heart” (Po serdtsu plamen’ probezhal [148]); following his doomed confrontation, he will press his hand to his heart as if to relieve the passions that first led him to rise up. The resentful hostility (zloba) ascribed to the elements in the prologue bubbles up during the flood: “Rioting spitefully about him” (Buntuia zlobno vkrug nego [147]). This same ancient fury possesses Evgenii at the moment of his own revolt: “He whispered with a shudder of spite” (Shelpnul on, zlobno zadrozhav [148]). Similarly, both the waters of the Neva and the blood in Evgenii’s veins boil at the moment of revolt: “The waves still seethed angrily, / As if beneath them fire were glowing”; “His blood seethed” (Eshche kipeli zlobno volny, / Kak by pod nimi tlel ogon’ [143]; Vskipela krov’ [148]). Following the flood, the mad Evgenii is further associated with the raging river both physically and linguistically: he abandons his apartment (which is described as pustynnyi [deserted, desolate], like the river’s original home) and wanders aimlessly through the space of the capital, as the untamed river once did. While the retreating Neva is likened to an invader, absconding to the noise of “cursing, panic, howls” (bran’, trevoga, voi! [143]), Evgenii is deafened by his own internal anxiety: “He was deafened / By the rushing noise of anxious inner turmoil” (On oglushen / Byl shumom vnutrennei trevogi [146). Both are depicted in bestial terms: the maddened river throws herself on the city “like a beast” (kak zver’ [140]), while the madman is degraded to “neither beast nor man” (ni zver’ ni chelovek [146]). The following autumn, the Neva once

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again threatens to overflow its embankment: “A sullen tide / Splashed the ­embankment” (Mrachnyi val / Pleskal na pristan’ [146]); that same night, just before his climactic confrontation, Evgenii assumes a similar aspect before the Horseman: “He stood sullen / Before the prideful statue” (On mrachen stal / Pred gordelivym istukanom [148]). The river bubbles and swirls before pouncing on the city (“Gurgling and welling up like a cauldron” [140]), just as Evgenii circles the Horseman’s pedestal before hurling his curse (“Round about the Idol’s pedestal / The poor deranged man walked” [147]). Throughout the poem, the river is strongly associated with the word vozmushchenie (rebellion, insurrection): waves rise like mountains “From the stirred-up deeps” (Iz vozmushchennoi glubiny [142]); the Idol stands before Evgenii “Over the tumultuous Neva” (Nad vozmushchennoiu Nevoiu [142]); the sated Neva draws back, “Reveling in the turmoil she had made” (Svoim liubuias’ ­vozmushchen’em [143]). When Evgenii fails to lift his “confused” gaze to the Horseman following the confrontation (“Would not lift up his turbid eyes” [Smushchennykh glaz ne podymal (149)]), the cognate carries similar ­associations with disturbance and trouble. Following their respective mutinies, both “elements” of Peter’s creation become at least nominally subdued: after the flood Evgenii runs “Toward the barely calmed-down river” (K edva smirivsheisia reke [143]); later, following his own mutiny, he presses his hand to his chest, “As if soothing its agony” (Kak by ego smiriaia muku [148]). The cyclical pattern to the river’s uprising, however, suggests that her submission— and, by extension, Evgenii’s—will be short-lived. Through extensive linguistic and metaphorical association with the destructive river, Evgenii’s ostensibly mild threat (his uzho) is revealed to be fully capable of destabilizing Peter’s creative Logos, just as the river once “undid” his creation narrative. Little wonder, then, that the embattled Peter must descend from his pedestal to keep Evgenii’s word from destroying his own, just as the God of Job was forced to “restabilize” his own cosmos in response to Job’s insolent curse. Although Evgenii’s inarticulateness makes him an unusual standard-bearer for the Word, it is clear that Peter recognizes something in his challenger’s words with enough power to destabilize an empire. Dmitrii Merezhkovsky envisioned the collapse of the entire Petrine era of Russian culture, as ­generations of Russian writers would take up the battle cry of Pushkin’s madman—“this challenge from the small to the great, this blasphemous cry of

Cursing at the Whirlwind

an outraged mob.”106 Some recent critics echo Merezhkovsky, identifying in Evgenii’s words a threat potent enough to goad Peter from his pedestal.107 In Rosenshield’s reading, Evgenii’s words become Word, a destructive—and equally powerful—counterpart to Peter’s own, impossible to ignore: “The Bronze Horseman heeds Evgenii because his voice is prophetic [. . .] It is a new Word, and that is why Peter must listen.”108 In all of these readings, the Horseman is compelled to heed Evgenii’s threat in order to protect his own legacy; for in his brief words lies the possibility that Peter’s shining monument, his city, will forever be associated with the dark side of the Petrine idea: the steep natural and human costs of world building, and the resulting, unavoidable rebellions, both ecological and political. In this artificial cosmos, engendered through the creative logos of Peter, Evgenii’s words are elevated to performativity, their very pronouncement calling metal to life.109 Like Job’s curse to the Creator, Evgenii’s threat becomes a sort of anti-logos, demanding response.110 Peter is compelled to abandon his elevated position in order to prevent Evgenii’s own destructive word from coming to fruition. In Job, God reappropriates the Word from his unruly servant through his authoritative speech from the whirlwind. In contrast, Peter proves unable to recapture the purloined Word from his subject: it is Evgenii who utters the final spoken words of the poem, transferring verbal power from creator to creature.111 Although Evgenii dies, he has effectively appropriated the creative logos from Peter. Peter’s divine aspirations—his artificial imposition of order over nature— inadvertently beget the double rebellion depicted in Bronze Horseman, one by river, one by clerk. And although the floodwaters abate, and the mad clerk signals his submission, the poem insinuates the lingering mutiny of these two unruly elements; after all, the environmental conditions that initiated the flood 106 D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Pushkin,” in Vechnye sputniki (1879; reprint Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 396. 107 Bethea, “Role of the Eques,” 117. 108 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 117. 109 For an excellent discussion of the performativity of language in Bronze Horseman, see ibid., 117. Nemirovskii also addresses the poem’s play on the theme of (in)animacy, noting that Evgenii is “deadened” while the monument is awakened (“Bibleiskaia tema,” 4). 110 Rosenshield labels curses, threats, and challenges “negative performatives” (Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 117). 111 Ibid.

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recur yearly, as indicated by the rising waves and spitting rain that return the following fall. Throughout the poem, a howling wind (voi) heralds the ­insurgence of the subjugated elements. The wind begins to blow early in part I (“And the wind blew, dismally howling”; “[he] wished / The wind would not howl so dismally” [i veter dul, pechal’no voia [138]; Chtob veter vyl ne tak unylo [140]), disturbing Evgenii’s dreams and signaling the oncoming flood. The howls gleefully accompany the flood as it devastates the city (“Like the wind, wildly howling”; “There howled the storm, there drifted / Wreckage” [Kak veter, buino zavyvaia; Tam buria vyla, tam nosilis’ / Oblomki [142]), continuing even as the waters recede (“Rape, cursing, panic, howls!” [Nasil’e, bran’, trevoga, voi! (143)]). A year later, the rain and winds return to remind Evgenii of the devastation, and of his personal loss (“Rain dripped, the wind was howling mournfully” [Dozhd’ kapal, veter vyl unylo (146)]). It is this memory of the catastrophe that finally prompts Evgenii’s own rebellion, and the howling wind is the final sound Evgenii hears before he hurls his curse at the bronze kumir. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this endless howl, the sole voice of nature’s rebellion, bears a near inversion of Job’s Russian name: Iov/voi. The wailing winds in the poem variously disturb the complacent Evgenii, tear at him during the flood, awaken him on the embankment, and rekindle the memory of his loss. In a sense, then, it is the very echoes of Job’s ancient rebellion that awaken and incite Evgenii to revolt. The recurrence of a volatile atmosphere in part II of the poem clearly implies that the disruption of order will not end with the flood or with Evgenii; rather, the periodic return of “flood conditions” in the capital will, each time, give rise to human rebellion. And whenever the rising wind signals a coming flood, the challenge of the Old Testament’s most famous rebel—his name encoded in the wind’s lament—will resonate in the rebellion of Petersburg’s artificially subjugated elements, both natural and human. Tarkhov’s groundbreaking 1977 article laid out the fundamental thematic correspondences between the Book of Job and The Bronze Horseman, revealing Peter as protective/punishing God and Evgenii as unsubdued theomachist. My own reading has focused more closely on the role of language in each work, in order to draw out the implications of Evgenii’s curse and the Horseman’s response within the logos-centric setting of Petersburg: read against Job, Evgenii’s apparently insignificant threat is revealed to contain a direct challenge

Cursing at the Whirlwind

to the very legitimacy of Peter’s world building. But while the biblical text might illuminate new corners of Pushkin’s poem, it is nonetheless a challenge to conclusively tie up a chapter devoted to two works that so actively resist critical attempts at conclusive interpretation. The Book of Job presents interpreters with a well-known set of challenges: “Job the patient” turns into “Job the rebel,” who in the end retracts his protest; the poem offers no resolution, either to the character or to the thorny theological issues he raises. Many of the questions that linger after Job has repented and found restoration transfer easily to the nineteenth-century Petersburg context: Why did the reformer tsar put the lives of his subjects in danger by erecting his stone city on the water? Can a single, inconsequential member of Petersburg’s bureaucratic hierarchy possibly ­understand his place in the larger historical processes galvanized by the Petrine project? And are we to accept the overpowering rebuke of the Horseman as the authoritative answer to these questions? Or, in the words of Job himself, “where shall wisdom be found?” (28:12): which of the various answers offered in the poems should one heed? In the Book of Job, the dialogues reveal the limited perspectives of Job and his friends, while God’s speech would appear to present a transcendent moral authority. The “final word,” however, belongs to the conclusion of the simple prose tale that frames the more sophisticated dialogues, offering a reassuring resolution to Job’s torments. As biblical scholar Carol Newsom observes, the transition back to the prose folktale “creates ironies” in the text: by affirming that Job had acted correctly, and that events worked out as his friends had predicted (with repentance and recompense), the epilogue undermines the assumption that the book ultimately adopts God’s perspective as authoritative. Indeed, Newsom stresses, the very structure of Job challenges the notion that any single perspective can resolve the issues raised; in the end, the multiple perspectives are shown to intersect and interrogate one another, but none are shown conclusively to prevail.112 Pushkin’s poema likewise admits multiple perspectives; the poet ­recognizes both the magnificence of Peter’s vision and its capacity for tragedy, and it is plausible to argue the poem’s endorsement of the position of either Peter, creator and protector of the new order, or of Evgenii, his outcast victim-­ challenger (and possible forerunner of the Decembrists). As in Job, however, 112 See Newsom, “The Book of Job,” 337–38.

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the cyclical structure—the epilogue returns us to the setting of the prologue— destabilizes any conviction that the poet sides with either Evgenii (whose voice carries enough threat to disturb the rest of the Creator) or Peter (whose ­awakened surrogate subdues his puny subject). Instead, we are returned to the natural order at what appears to be a time before the momentous appearance of On. This return to a landscape untouched by the intrusive, transformative Word of Peter raises the question of language and its role in the origins and preservation of the Petrine order. This problem, too, is prefigured in its biblical subtext: as Newsom points out, the Book of Job is, at its core, an exploration of the “adequacy and limits of various kinds of religious language.”113 Words are repeatedly shown to fail in Petersburg: while Pushkin relies on Joban subtext to flesh out Evgenii’s complaints, the fact remains that the clerk’s “word” (uzho) is barely language; meanwhile, Peter’s creation-by-Word is perverted, and his retort to Evgenii purely physical. Old poetic forms (odes) might be good for praising the monarch, but they prove inadequate for exploring the complex dynamic between Peter and Evgenii, colossal creator and puny subject, in this new age. Evgenii might pronounce the last word in his confrontation with the Horseman, but the final word in the poem belongs to Pushkin, the new poetic authority who smoothly shifts our gaze from the heart of Peter’s metropolis to its peripheral islands, dissolving in those now-calm waters the potential dominance of any individual character’s voice. On this barren island, narrow political truths are superseded by a higher moral truth as Pushkin displays the possibilities of a new poetic language that is authoritative and sophisticated, encompassing multiple perspectives: it is as creative as Peter’s, as challenging as Evgenii’s, as powerful and disruptive as the wind and the river themselves.

113 Ibid., 335.

2 Gambling Away the Petri-mony Rival Models of Social Advancement in Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades”

In The Bronze Horseman, Evgenii—a representative of Pushkin’s own class and a potential stand-in for the poet1—puts forth a radical new word to force Peter from his pedestal and to bring them, creator and creature, to equal footing. What would happen when a new type of hero (this one a parvenu in the Petrine social order) aimed to inherit Peter’s authority? “The Queen of Spades,” ­Pushkin’s second entry in what would later be called the Petersburg Text, shifts the question of logos from the mythological to the historical plane, as a spiritual “son” of the emperor attempts to appropriate a status beyond his social station. But rather than call Peter down to his own level, this young upstart endeavors to bound up the tsar’s own ladder of rank in an attempt to unseat and supplant the father of the modern Russian state. Pushkin completed his tale within just a few weeks of The Bronze Horseman, during the prolific Boldino autumn of 1833, so it is reasonable to assume that the poet would have been wrestling with many of the same issues in both texts.   1 On Pushkin’s historical or biographical identification with his “well-born” hero, see Priscilla Meyer, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Madison: ­University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 19; and David M. Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: ­Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 65.

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Indeed, for all their differences (narrative verse vs. prose fiction; “little man” hero vs. Napoleonic striver), the two works have much in common: the theme of social change (the decline of a déclassé aristocrat in The Bronze Horseman may be plotted against the rise of a commoner in “Queen”); the deft handling of the literary fantastic (both unfold in the shadowy interspace between the ­supernatural and the psychological); and the coincidence of time (the two tales take place in the years either just before or just after the pivotal Decembrist uprising of 1825). These common threads intertwine to weave an equivocal image of St. Petersburg: opulent or nouveau-riche; fantastical or potentially demonic; revolutionary or despotic. Indeed, of all the correspondences between the two texts, the most important is undoubtedly their status as complementary reflections of Pushkin’s ambivalent vision of Petersburg. Alexandra Smith considers Pushkin to be Peter’s co-architect of the capital, arguing that the poet’s complex and dynamic portraits of the stillevolving city in The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades” establish a cultural space as lasting and influential as the physical city itself.2 Without doubt, the heroes of these two tales of 1833 share more than just the same city streets; they inhabit the same sinister semiotic space, within which both tragedies are inaugurated by a howling storm on a winter’s night.3 The Bronze Horseman achieves the ambiguity of its presentation by opening on the resplendent young capital of official myths before darkening into the terrible November of Evgenii’s sad tale. But while “Queen” presents a ­decidedly more privileged cast of characters than Horseman, their plot unfolds in a dreary Petersburg close to that of the tragic clerk’s. And while   2 Alexandra Smith, “Pushkin’s Imperial Image of St Petersburg Revisited,” in Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, 2:117–38. For more on Pushkin’s role in constructing the myth of Petersburg, particularly in The Bronze Horseman, see also Smith’s “Pushkin’s Petersburg as Comic Apocalypse,” in her Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian TwentiethCentury Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 103–61.   3 Numerous allusions to foul weather and darkness establish that the story takes place in a chronotope, or spatio-temporal context, familiar from The Bronze Horseman: Germann hears the fateful anecdote on a long winter night; two days later, he stands for hours before the Countess’s house watching Liza, insensate to the cold wind; on the night of the ball, he waits to enter the Countess’s home in a raging storm, and the deserted streets, wet snow, and howling wind could have blown in from the stanzas of the Petersburg poema. For more on the common representations of winter across Eugene Onegin, The Bronze Horseman, and “The Queen of Spades,” see Paul Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 228–29.

Gambling Away the Petri-mony

the storm might be the same, there is a crucial shift in perspective from outside (exposed, vulnerable) to in (secure, successful); whereas the poet of The Bronze Horseman alternately sings the praises of the city’s graceful lines and exposes the terrible price of such grandeur in the flood-ravaged rubble, the author of “The Queen of Spades” scarcely describes his hibernal city, beyond its opulent interiors. If Pushkin’s presentation of Petersburg in The Bronze Horseman is ­ambiguous, his attitude toward its founder is even more complex; from ­structure to subject matter, every aspect of the poem articulates its creator’s doubts about Peter’s legacy and its costs, both ecological and human. But while the Neva and Evgenii are portrayed as fellow victims of Peter’s ruthless world building, Germann is in a position of potential power: he is not a ­disenfranchised nobleman (as Evgenii is assumed to be), but a German upand-comer, ­empowered to climb the rungs suspended by the westernizing tsar. Rather than focusing on the human casualties of Peter’s plan, “Queen” ­highlights a potential beneficiary of the tsar’s reforms, keeping the spotlight squarely on the t­ riumphant city, crown jewel of the tsar’s reforms and natural habitat of the realm’s most powerful citizens. Over his final decade (1827–37), Pushkin undertook the colossal historical and literary project of capturing Tsar Peter and his time; while the portrait had grown increasingly dark by 1833’s The Bronze Horseman, the companion tale “Queen” brought some measure of nuance to the ongoing endeavor by introducing a few bright notes—­ particularly in comparison to its unrelievedly negative representation of Catherine II, whose legacy is also on display. Ultimately, however, both texts express the author’s apprehension over Russia’s Petrine inheritance, though for very different reasons: where The Bronze Horseman surveys the human toll of the tsar’s project, “The Queen of Spades” exposes the debilitating social and ­historical processes it unleashed.

The Ace, the Seven, and the Three: The Petrine Code of “The Queen of Spades” By now it is customary for new interpreters of “The Queen of Spades” to cite, and then to ignore, Caryl Emerson’s sage warning that Pushkin “provides us not with a code, and not with chaos, but precisely with the fragments of codes,

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codes that tantalize but do not quite add up. He teases the reader with partial keys.”4 This chapter does the same; indeed, although in Terras’s estimation the story has been overinterpreted,5 the temptation to grab hold of one of P ­ ushkin’s partial keys and hope for the best is irresistible. No single reading could—or indeed should—hope to offer a definitive “key” to such a multiply, and ­delightfully, interpretable story; my own interpretation builds on the work of many other scholars to contribute a new word to the lively scholarly c­ onversation that continues to buzz around Pushkin’s masterpiece. “The Queen of Spades” is commonly interpreted in terms of a ­generational clash:6 the Age of Enlightenment vs. a new age of materialism, the ancien régime vs. the Napoleonic self-made man.7 These two time periods—with the Countess representing the aristocratic age of Catherine the Great and Germann as the grasping new generation of the 1820s–30s, poised to displace the ancient nobility—are narratively interlaced, stitched together by the secret of the cards. It is important to remember, however, that the secret was authored in an even more distant past—that there are more than these two generations present in the tale, however implicitly. One major theme of the story is that of time’s passage and the impression it leaves behind: the complacent aristocracy may be giving way to the ambitious upstarts of the new generation, but the traces of the past are etched in everything Germann covets, from the Countess’s grotesque,   4 Caryl Emerson, “‘The Queen of Spades’ and the Open End,” in Puškin Today, 35–36.   5 Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 241.   6 For more on the cultural clash between the epochs of Catherine and Nicholas, see Andrew Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” Pushkin Review 3 (2000): 15–17; Luba Golburt, “Catherine’s Retinue: Old Age, Fashion, and Historicism in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review 68, no. 4 (2009): 791–95. For a summary of Soviet scholarship on the generational clash, see Iu. M. Lotman, “‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart i kartochnoi igry v russkoi literature XIX veka,” in Izbrannye stat’i, 2:403n28.   7 One traditional line of scholarship, following Tomsky’s observation that Germann “has the profile of Napoleon and the soul of Mephistopheles,” construes the young engineer as a Napoleonic figure. See G. P. Makogonenko, “O nekotorykh osobennostiakh poetiki ‘Pikovoi damy’: K sta vos’mi-desiatiletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia A. S. Pushkina,” Neva, no. 6 (1979): 187; and Felix Raskolnikoff, “Irratsional’noe v Pikovoi dame,” Revue des études slaves 59, nos. 1–2 (1987): 258–59; for a comparative treatment of the Napoleonic theme in Russian Romanticism, see Lauren G. Leighton, The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature: Decembrism and Freemasonry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 120–22; for a “demystification” of Germann’s Napoleonic persona, see Maxim D. Shrayer, “Rethinking Romantic Irony: Puškin, Byron, Schlegel and The Queen of Spades,” Slavic and East European Journal 36, no. 4 (1992): 401–4.

Gambling Away the Petri-mony

lined body and the fading Chinese silk lining the walls of her boudoir to the mesmerizing anecdote itself.8 If the present is haunted by the past—if the relics and legends of one generation play such a powerful role in shaping and even perverting future generations—then wouldn’t the past likewise have been haunted by its own past? In other words, is it possible to discern the traces of an even earlier generation within the fabric of Pushkin’s tale? This chapter argues that Germann’s path is determined not only by the corrupt Catherine, but by the reformist Peter, whose world-building Word is encoded in the mysterious cards.

Nobles and New Men: Pushkin’s Class Anxieties Scholars have proposed a variety of explanations—from the supernatural to the psychoanalytic—for why Germann draws the wrong card at the end of the tale.9 This is no run-of-the-mill punishment Pushkin metes out, however: by   8 A number of scholars have commented on the complicated treatment of time in the tale, and particularly on the interplay among historical periods: G. A. Gukovskii reads the tale as a “montage” of scenes from two epochs (Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia [Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957], 349); Iu. Seleznev notes the collapse of two time periods into one, as well as the cyclicality suggested by the epilogue (“Proza Pushkina i razvitie russkoi literatury [k poetike siuzheta],” in V mire Pushkina: Sbornik statei [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1974], 413–36); for Vinogradov, the past is at once complete and “a foundation of the present” (V. V. Vinogradov, “[O ‘Pikovoi Dame’] iz knigi ‘Stil’ ­Pushkina,’” in O iazyke khudozhestvennoi prozy: Izbrannye trudy [Moscow: Nauka, 1980], 256); in Golburt’s words, this narrative schema—in which the Countess, herself modeled on Catherine II, might wither and die but also serve as a template for her ward Liza— amounts to a “vertiginous conglomeration of historical planes, distinct but also always repetitive” (“Catherine’s Retinue,” 795).   9 Some critics (Andrej Kodjak, Diana Burgin) emphasize the story’s supernatural elements, while others (Nathan Rosen, Debreczeny) reach for a realistic explanation; psychoanalysts, for instance, posit that Germann’s guilt prompts him to draw the wrong card. One critic suggests that Saint-Germain uses the elixir of life to return as the dealer Chekalinskii and punish the devious upstart (Gareth Williams, “Pushkin and Jules Janin: A Contribution to the Literary Background of ‘The Queen of Spades,’” Quinquereme 4, no. 2 [1981]: 211; Neil Cornwell, “‘You’ve heard of the Count Saint-Germain . . .’—in Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ and Far Beyond,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 36 [2002]: 50), while another has speculated that it is Pushkin himself who punishes his young protagonist, out of Masonic loyalty to his fellow-Freemason Saint-Germain (Davydov, “The Ace in ‘The Queen of Spades,’” Slavic Review 58, no. 2 [1999]: 327). For a more thorough summary of these various positions, see Neil Cornwell, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (London: Bristol ­Classical Press, 1993), 28–31.

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the end of a tale that is largely about legacy, he has functionally eliminated Germann not only from society but from his family’s line of descent. In choosing the wrong card, Germann has lost both his chance at the fortune and a shot at posterity; he is reduced to a gibbering madman, incapable of either creation or procreation. What transgression might prompt an author to treat his creature so cruelly? In recent years, a growing number of scholars have begun to point toward Pushkin’s anxiety over socio-cultural shifts in the early nineteenth century in order to explain this treatment of his social-climbing hero.10 Gary Rosenshield has argued that Germann represents the precursor of the raznochintsy (men of various ranks), the socially displaced sons of the non-­ nobility who would rise to dominate Russian intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century, and whose influence was already apparent in the 1840s. Rosenshield goes on to argue that Pushkin unconsciously deals Germann “all the wrong cards” in order to prevent him, and the materialistic forces he represents, from destroying the social order.11 Andrew Wachtel, too, reads the ending as “Pushkin’s rather nasty revenge against the class embodied by Hermann [Germann].”12 Certainly, by the early 1830s Pushkin had moved away from the quasi-­ democratic ideals of the Decembrists and toward a spirited defense of his own endangered class.13 By then, the ancient families of the hereditary nobility (dvoriane), among them Pushkin’s and, as we have seen, his “nameless” hero Evgenii’s, had been largely disenfranchised—rendered impoverished and 10 It should be noted that the political nature of Germann’s actions was a common feature of Soviet criticism as well; these class-conscious readings tended to construe Germann as a rebel against the fading aristocracy. See Gukovskii, Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia, 340–74; D. P. Iakubovich, “‘Pikovaia Dama’: Stat’ia i kommentarii,” in A. S. Pushkin: Pikovaia dama (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1936); B. V. Tomashevskii, “Istorizm Pushkina,” in Pushkin: Raboty raznykh let (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 198–99; and N. L. Stepanov, Proza Pushkina (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1962), 76–79. See also summaries in Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 214n54, and Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 20–21. 11 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 58–62. 12 Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 21. 13 See Sergei Davydov, “The Evolution of Pushkin’s Political Thought,” in The Pushkin Handbook, ed. David M. Bethea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 306–9. For more on the evolution of the poet’s political philosophy, see J. Douglas Clayton, Dimitry’s Shade: A Reading of Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (Evanston, IL: Northwestern ­University Press, 2004), 54–79, 168–75.

Gambling Away the Petri-mony

powerless—through a series of state policies initiated in the early eighteenth century. Russia had emerged as a modern state under Peter the Great, who inherited a nation rootbound by tradition and burdened beneath the weight of its medieval social and political structures. Peter’s revolutionary series of reforms pruned and reshaped every major state and cultural institution, from the army to the Church, allowing Muscovy to blossom into a modern European empire. For the nobility, perhaps the most debilitating of Peter’s reforms was the establishment in 1722 of the Table of Ranks, a compulsory fourteen-rung ladder leading up through the echelons of state service and providing, at the eighth rung from the top, an entry point into the nobility. The Table was intended to cultivate a meritocratic select to serve the newly transformed state. The nobles were forced to abandon their serfs for service in the capitals, where aspirants of all classes ascended the rungs of Peter’s Table based on p­ erformance, rather than pedigree. The emphasis on merit over bloodlines encouraged men from all backgrounds to aspire to the new metropolitan “service nobility” (sluzhiloe dvorianstvo), a development that diluted the ranks of the ancient blood nobility, who now had to compete for position with hungry commoners, and created a growing class of “new men,” whom the displaced aristocrats despised as parvenus.14 The ancient aristocrats continued their long decline under subsequent rulers, in particular Catherine II, who consolidated Peter’s reforms and cast herself as his spiritual and intellectual successor.15 And as the hereditary 14 For more on this process, see Kahn, Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, 2–3; and Sam Driver, Puškin: Literature and Social Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 16. It is important to recall that blood was still a powerful conveyor of social status under Peter; the Table might have imposed an obligation to serve, but it still recognized the privileges of birthright. As the historian Michael Confino notes, a member of the hereditary nobility could still pass on his title without climbing the ladder first. The Table thus contained an ambiguity: in purporting to abolish the privileges of lineage in favor of service, it codified the attainment of honors previously accessible only to the nobility; meanwhile, it continued to recognize those same privileges afforded by birth (Michael Confino, Russia before the “Radiant Future”: Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society [New York: Berghahn Books, 2011], 125–26). Regardless, as Kahn emphasizes, the nobility lost ground under the new system, while the “new men” advanced into their territory (Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, 3). 15 See Davydov, “Evolution of Pushkin’s Political Thought,” 309; and Kahn, Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, 3–4.

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nobility sank ever lower, a new and distinctive feature of the Catherinian age emerged, emphasizing the very “fortuitous” nature of fortunes:16 ­Catherine’s famous custom of favoritism meant that one’s luck might change overnight by the whim of the empress, as handsome young favorites were chosen and enriched. In his famous analysis of gambling and card games as a modeling system for Catherine’s court, Lotman summarizes the late e­ ighteenth-century phenomenon of favoritism: “Enormous fortunes were created in an instant, depending on leaps of luck in spheres far distant from economics.”17 He cites Kaster, who calculates that Catherine distributed 92.5 million rubles to various favorites.18 Despite these new paths to riches, historical processes already in motion (such as the decline of the nobility and the rise of the “new men”) continued as they had under Peter; ­Catherine’s tendencies simply implied that bureaucratic service was not the only route to political power. Nonetheless, the policy of institutionalized favoritism had the effect of further debasing the blood nobility and d­elegitimizing the new aristocracy.19 These major socio-cultural shifts, initiated by Peter and continued under his successors, were keenly felt a century later, during Pushkin’s lifetime. Pushkin himself was anxious about the disfranchisement of his own class and the need to reestablish its political and material status, and by the late 1820s his obsession with the causes for his own family’s loss of status had begun to creep into his literary and political writings. As early as 1822, Pushkin had expressed his thoughts on the Peter-Catherine theme in his “Notes on Russian History of the Eighteenth Century,” composed in Kishinev at the poet’s most liberal stage.20 The document is generally read as a radical expression of admiration for Peter I and a condemnation of both the nobility and serfdom. Driver has convincingly reinterpreted it to demonstrate that Pushkin voices approval for Peter (whom he associates with tyranny later on in the notes) only to provide contrast with the “roguery” (plutovstvo) of his successors (particularly the 16 Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 16; for a detailed account of this feature of her reign, see Robert K. Massie, “Potemkin and Favoritism,” in Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (New York: Random House, 2011), 413–60. 17 Lotman, “‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart,” 398. 18 Ibid., 398–99. 19 For a discussion of Catherine II’s practice of favoritism, see Douglas Smith, introduction to Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), xxxii–xliii. 20 See A. S. Pushkin, “Zametki po russkoi istorii XVIII veka,” in PSS, 11:14–17.

Gambling Away the Petri-mony

empresses Anna and Catherine).21 Indeed, as Bethea has pointed out, the young poet’s ­(somewhat ambivalent) portrait of Peter is practically ­“eulogistic” compared to his negative portrayal of Catherine, who is characterized as an overpraised “Tartuffe in a skirt and a crown.”22 Pushkin goes on to describe the atmosphere of debauchery and arbitrariness that distinguished her rule: “The reign of C ­ atherine II had a new and powerful influence on the political and moral ­condition of Russia. Raised to the throne through the plot of a few mutineers, she enriched them at the expense of the people and humiliated our anxious nobility. [. . .] It was because of [the widespread corruption of her reign] that there appeared the gigantic estates of completely unknown families and the total lack of honor and honesty in the higher class of people. From chancellor to lowliest clerk everything was stolen and ­ everything was for sale. Thus did a debauched ruler debauch her government.”23 In short, the poet’s early writings suggest, while Peter’s championing of merit had ­enfeebled the nobility, ­Catherine’s nepotism degraded the entire system. A decade later, the mature Pushkin’s attitude toward these two rulers and the effects of their policies had grown more complicated; but while his rhetoric had cooled, his feelings were no less ardent. By this time, of course, Pushkin was feeling oppressed by his own relationship with the court: his dawning r­ ealization of personal and creative entrapment following Tsar Nicholas’s 1826 “offer” to be his official censor; his humiliating bestowal with the court rank of ­kammerjunker (junior chamberlain) in late 1833—an honor typically reserved for younger men24—and his suspicion that the tsar had made him a courtier solely so that his beautiful young wife Natalia could attend palace balls; his mounting debt, his resulting dependence on Nicholas’s patronage, and his growing consciousness of his marginality, both social and historical. His attempts to untangle this mess of personal and political problems—the decline 21 Driver, Puškin, 12. 22 According to Pushkin, naïve foreign writers and philosophers may be forgiven their tendency to “prevoznosit’ dobrodeteli Tartiufa v iupke i v korone” (PSS, 11:17). For more on Pushkin’s attitude toward Catherine as ruler (including a connection between the Kishinev notes of 1822 and the description of the Countess’s household in “The Queen of Spades,” see David M. Bethea, “Taboo and the Family Romance in The Captain’s Daughter,” in Taboo Pushkin, 325–26. 23 PSS, 11:15–16. Translation from Bethea, “Taboo and the Family Romance,” 325–26. 24 For a nuanced reassessment of Pushkin’s career in the state service, including his possibly disproportionate offense at his kammerjunker appointment, see Irina Reyfman, “Pushkin the Titular Councilor,” in Taboo Pushkin, 41–59.

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of the nobility, the eighteenth-century roots of this decline, and its effect on both his own family’s fortune and on the balance of power in the state—can be felt in his political and literary writings of the period.25 Pushkin articulates his attitude toward Peter and Catherine most explicitly in various political writings from the early 1830s, in particular a rough outline for an article composed between 1830 and 1835 (later titled “On the Nobility” [O dvorianstve] by scholars). While Pushkin’s admiration for Peter is still in evidence, he clearly resents the effect the tsar’s reforms had on the nobility; although the drafts are sketchy, the author’s censure is unmistakable from the opening chain of associations (“Pierre I . . . les rangs . . . chute de la noblesse”), which telegraphs the causal relationship between Peter’s establishment of the Table of Ranks and the degradation of the gentry class.26 The document closes with an equally powerful statement of causality: “The 25 As scholars have noted, the poet’s ambivalence springs in part from the paradox of his ­heritage: descended on the paternal side from an ancient family, now impoverished and marginalized, and on the maternal side from an African slave who was given as a gift to Peter I and then rose to the rank of general through the personal patronage of the tsar, Pushkin keenly felt the tension between “hereditary noble and post-Petrine creature,” in the words of William Mills Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 107. 26 PSS, 12:205. Pushkin condemned these developments for more than just personal reasons: in his view, the hereditary nobleman acts as a necessary counterbalance to the throne and as a potential protector of “the interests of the entire nation” (Il’ia Feinberg, Nezavershennye raboty Pushkina [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969], 65, in Sam Driver, “Puškin and Politics: The Later Works,” Slavic and East European Journal 25, no. 3 [1981]: 10). As he demanded in an 1834 diary entry, “Who was at the [Senate] Square on December 14th? Only the nobles. How many of them will there be at the next mutiny? I don’t know, but it seems quite a few” (PSS, 12:335). By obstructing the blood nobility, Peter’s construction of the Table of Ranks had thus fatally tilted the balance of power in the Russian state toward unlimited autocracy. Pushkin had specifically equated the welfare of the serfs with that of the nobility as far back as the Kishinev “Notes” of 1822: “Our political freedom is now inseparable from the emancipation of the serfs” (PSS, 11:15). His belief in the intersecting interests of gentry and peasantry intensified after the failure of the Decembrist revolt, and culminated in the unfinished essay “Journey from Moscow to Petersburg” (1833–35), which was begun in December 1833, immediately following the completion of The History of Pugachev. For more on the special historical role of the nobility as a check against absolutism, see Pushkin, “Journey,” PSS, 11:243–67; Driver, Puškin, 40–51; Davydov, “Evolution of Pushkin’s Political Thought,” 308–9; Oleg Proskurin, “Pushkin and Politics,” in Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, 114–15. For a complementary reading of “Journey” as a corrective for Radishchev’s faulty historical vision, see Svetlana Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination (New Haven: Yale ­University Press, 1999), 87–106.

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gradual decline of the nobility; what are the consequences? The ascent of Catherine II, the 14th of December, and so on.”27 For Pushkin, these historical moments are all connected, aligned like beads along a single string: Peter’s reformation ­destabilized the nobility, which in turn led to the rise of Catherine and the events of 1825. This chain of revolutions—Peter’s reforms, Catherine’s coup, and the Decembrist uprising—demonstrates the unintended imprint of the past on the present; as I will suggest, this same revolutionary line runs through “The Queen of Spades.” Pinpointing the “now” of the tale will aid us in establishing a broader historical timeframe. Most critics assume that the story’s “present day” takes place in 1833, when Pushkin composed it, dating the “sixty years ago” of the anecdote to the 1780s. Several critics, however, have claimed that the tale takes place closer to the revolutionary year of 1825.28 These critics argue that Pushkin wrote the imitation-agitational epigraph to chapter 1, along with the first, fragmentary draft of his tale—which opened with the foreboding words, “Four years ago we gathered, a number of young people, in Petersburg”—in 1828 or 1829.29 Shifting the tale to the time of the Decembrist uprising likewise shifts the Countess’s glory days to the 1760s, a period that corresponds to her ­historical prototype’s 1761 stay in Paris and, a year later, the presence of the historical comte de Saint-Germain in St. Petersburg, where he allegedly ­participated in the plot that deposed Catherine’s husband and installed the empress on the throne.30 As Neil Cornwell notes, this new timeframe—six decades bracketed by two bloody rebellions—insinuates the theme of revolt 27 PSS, 12:206. 28 For an overview of this scholarship, see Cornwell, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, 21–22; N. O. Lerner, “Istoriia ‘Pikovoi Damy,’” in Rasskazy o Pushkine (Leningrad: Priboi,1929), 132–63; B. Ia. Vilenchik, “Istoricheskoe proshloe v ‘Pikovoi dame,’” Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii 1981 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), 173–79; and V. Esipov, “Istoricheskii podtekst v povesti Pushkina ‘Pikovaia dama,’” Voprosy literatury, no. 4 (1989): 193–205. 29 Esipov, “Istoricheskii podtekst,” 200; Cornwell, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, 22. Also note that the Countess’s presumed prototype, Princess Golitsyna (1741–1837), would have been eighty-seven (the same age as the Countess in the tale) in 1828 or 1829, when Pushkin first conceived her story. 30 For more on the historical personages and precedents in the pages of “The Queen of Spades,” see Cornwell, “‘You’ve heard of the Count Saint-Germain’; and Cornwell, Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, 21–22. Information on Saint-Germain’s time in Russia and involvement in the 1762 coup may be found on “‘You’ve heard of the Count Saint-Germain,’” 52.

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into the work.31 This subtext is further heightened if we jump back just one more sixty-year interval into the past, to land at the apogee of the original “Russian revolution”: Peter’s radical reforms at the turn of the eighteenth century. This new schema arrays the various eras of “Queen”—its present, past, and distant past—backwards along the chain of revolutionary events defining modern Russian history: the Decembrist uprising, the coup of Catherine the Great, and finally the cultural revolution of Peter the Great.

Peter and Catherine in Pushkin’s Art Pushkin’s anxiety over his declining social status, as well as his ambivalence toward the legacies of Peter and Catherine, are brought to fuller life outside of his political sketches, in the prose and poetic texts of the author’s final decade. Several autobiographical lyrics and verse narratives of the early 1830s express the poet’s preoccupation with his own ancestry, both real and imagined: the tragic plots of two disenfranchised noblemen unfold in the unfinished ­Ezerskii (1832–33) and, more famously, The Bronze Horseman (1833), which implicitly attributes its hero’s “forgotten” family name to the socio-political reforms of Peter.32 A few years earlier, Pushkin’s prickly pride in his own six-­ hundred-year-old lineage—and his bitterness over its degradation—had been on display in “My Genealogy” (“Moia rodoslovnaia,” 1830), a two-part poem famously provoked by an attack on Pushkin’s ancestry by his literary rival Faddei Bulgarin. If “My Genealogy” mythologizes Pushkin’s own lineage, another poem from the same year, “To a Grandee” (K vel’mozhe), presents what Catriona Kelly has termed a “displaced autobiography”: a portrait that expresses the poet’s “identification with a culture that he could never have been part of and yet lays claim to, and gives voice to a poignant desire for a world from which he was separated in terms not only of time and space, but also of social position.”33 This idealized representation of eighteenth-century 31 For more on this subversive subtext—including the claim that Pushkin once sketched the “German” Decembrist leader Pavel Pestel with a Napoleonic profile—see Cornwell, Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, 21–22. 32 For more on literary reflections of Pushkin’s political ideas, see Driver, “Politics and Literature,” in his Puškin, 54–76. 33 Catriona Kelly, “Pushkin’s Vicarious Grand Tour: A Neo-Sociological Interpretation of ‘K vel’mozhe’ (1830),” Slavonic and East European Review, 77, no. 1 (1999): 4.

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aristocratic culture, which Pushkin appears to desire and disdain in equal measure, is dominated by the figure of Catherine: the addressee of the poem, Prince Iusupov, was Catherine’s wealthy courtier and diplomat (“The young envoy of the Woman who was crowned”), and Pushkin obliquely suggests that the practice of favoritism may have played a role in the fortune of this “lucky man” (shchastlivyi chelovek).34 The richest explorations of Romanov power and the leveling of the classes may be found in Pushkin’s historical works of the 1830s, both fictional and nonfictional; taken as a whole, these constitute an ambitious attempt to confront the legacy of the eighteenth century and the power it continued to exert over the social structures of Pushkin’s age. When read as a collection of paired fiction and nonfiction narratives, these accounts capture the ambivalent legacies of eighteenth-century tsars and rebel leaders alike; as Bethea points out, for instance, Pushkin’s poetic treatment of Peter in The Bronze Horseman (1833) animates his more “objective” portrait in the unfinished History of Peter, and the magnetic Pugachev of The Captain’s Daughter (1836) complicates the historical account of his barbaric uprising in The History of Pugachev (1833– 34).35 Typically such schemas group together The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827–28; unfinished), Poltava (1828–29), The Bronze Horseman (1833), and The History of Peter the Great (1832–37; unfinished) as Pushkin’s attempts to capture Peter, first poetically, then historically. The image of Peter in these works shifts dramatically over the course of the decade, from the sympathetic representation of an energetic worker and magnificent warrior in Blackamoor 34 PSS, 3:217. See Kelly, “Vicarious Grand Tour,” 23. In general, the appropriation of the ancient aristocracy by wealthy arrivistes during the age of Catherine I is a frequent motif in works from the “Notes on Russian History of the Eighteenth Century” to “To a Grandee.” Where Pushkin’s Peter of this period is an equivocal figure, his sins balanced by his virtues, his portrait of Catherine was consistently “tinged with an animosity and blame for the way she had undermined the nobility” (Kahn, Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, 3; also see Simon Dixon, “Pushkin and History,” in Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, 126–28). 35 Bethea, “Pushkin as Historical Thinker,” in Pushkin Handbook, 272. For more on Pushkin’s historical writing, see Bethea, “Pushkin as Historical Thinker,” 266–82; Dixon, “Pushkin and History,” 118–30; and Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination. For a more comprehensive list of scholars who have contributed to the study of Pushkin’s historical thinking, see Bethea, “Pushkin as Historical Thinker,” 276n4. On the problematic relationship between Pushkin’s histories and historical fiction, see Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, 1–28; and Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 66–87.

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and Poltava, to the much richer and more ambiguous representations in Bronze Horseman and History—half divinity, half despot—as Pushkin became increasingly aware of and repelled by the tyranny and brutality of Peter’s reign. The portrait of the Petrine legacy that emerges out of this decade-long project is thus ambiguous, presenting a once-sanctified figure now shadowed by cruelty. Although Catherine had no such cycle of works dedicated to her, she certainly figures strongly in the pair of historical works examining the Pugachev ­rebellion: the failed Cossack revolt took place during the early years of her reign, ­immediately after she had seized power in 1762; the rebel leader, Emelian Pugachev, claimed to be Peter III, the husband Catherine was widely believed to have ordered murdered. Structural parallels between the impostor Pugachev and the usurper Catherine in The Captain’s Daughter undermine the legitimacy of the German princess’s own claim to the throne, and the novel’s controlling principle of chance evokes the unpredictable atmosphere of favoritism that distinguished her rule.36 Although “The Queen of Spades” is not commonly included among these historical works, Luba Golburt suggests that it might profitably be read as a companion piece to The Bronze Horseman, as a complementary investigation into eighteenth-century power and the individual.37 Certainly, both Catherine and Peter were on Pushkin’s mind at the time of the two tales’ composition. In 1831, Pushkin had been granted access to the Imperial Archives to begin work on The History of Peter the Great. That same year, his general interest in r­ evolution and revolutionary figures drew him to begin research on the Pugachev rebellion of 1773. He continued to research both topics, which would eventually ­culminate in the explosion of historical and literary works discussed above. “The Queen of Spades” was written during the Boldino autumn of 1833, a creatively abundant six weeks during which he also composed both The History of Pugachev and The Bronze Horseman, among other works. It has been well ­established in the critical literature that Catherine’s ambiguous legacy is on display in “The Queen of Spades.” I propose to broaden the story’s historical 36 See, for example, Iu. M. Lotman, “Ideinaia struktura Kapitanskoi dochki,” in Pushkinskii sbornik, ed. M. T. Efimova et al. (Pskov: Pskovskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut im. S. M. Kirova, 1962), 3–20, for parallels between Masha/Catherine and Grinev/Pugachev. 37 See Golburt, “Catherine’s Retinue,” 798n43 for a list of paired works in this larger project and an excellent summary of sources.

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foundation, to read it also in light of its Petrine inheritance: to reconsider it as a new link in that chain of literary texts constituting Pushkin’s portrait of Peter, yet another of the fictional fragments which, assembled, capture some of the dualism of Peter’s legacy. In this new interpretation, “The Queen of Spades” becomes the sole literary text of Pushkin’s eighteenth-century project to unify and contrast the rival legacies of the reformer Peter and his successor Catherine. In the broadest terms, “Queen” was composed at the precise moment when Pushkin’s long preoccupation with the Peter question branched off into an examination of Catherine and her times (he began working on The History of Pugachev in 1833). It is likely that the poet’s fascination with these two ­eighteenth-century rulers was fueled by historical factors beyond his concern with lineage and the status of the nobility: the transition from Alexander I to Nicholas I, who had modeled their own imperial images on different forebears, had recently thrown the rival legacies of Peter and Catherine back into high relief. In the years immediately following the coup d’état that brought her to the throne, Catherine attempted to establish legitimacy by casting herself as the spiritual heir of Peter the Great.38 The four-word inscription she approved for the Falconet monument to Peter (Petro Primo Catharina Secunda) ­demonstrated her intention to suggest a direct line of succession between Peter and herself, to couple their achievements in the public imagination and leave their legacies forever entwined.39 Catherine’s estranged son and heir, Paul, however, wholly rejected his mother’s values and aligned himself rather with Peter and his martial image, dissolving the link Catherine had so carefully forged and ensuring that the reputations of the two leaders would remain in competition throughout the nineteenth century.40 Alexander I’s accession to the throne in 1801 brought a rehabilitation of Catherine’s image, as the new tsar promised to lead according to the “heart and laws” of his grandmother Catherine.41 The first years of ­Alexander’s reign saw the reissue of Catherine’s historical works, plays, and 38 For more on Catherine’s claim to recapture Peter’s ideological “spirit,” and the elaboration of this mythos in literature and art, see Vera Proskurina, Creating the Empress: Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 23–29. 39 Simon Dixon, “The Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II in Russia, 1797–1837,” Slavonic and East European Review 77, no. 4 (1999): 656. 40 Ibid., 657; see also Proskurina, Creating the Empress, 80–83. 41 Dixon, “Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II,” 660.

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correspondences with intellectual luminaries; in fact, the urge to revive her memory was so strong that, according to Simon Dixon, “documents about Catherine accounted for almost eighty percent of the historical material published in Russian journals in the first five years of the nineteenth century.”42 This revival of Catherine’s reputation in the first years of the new century was reversed again in 1825, as Nicholas, famously antagonistic toward his ­grandmother’s memory, like Paul before him, sought to model his image on Peter’s militarism.43 “The Queen of Spades” was composed in 1833 and set around the time of Nicholas I’s accession to the throne, a time of cultural ­reorientation away from the “feminine” values and iconography of Catherine II back toward the masculine image of Peter I; undoubtedly, the connections and contrasts between these competing autocratic systems were a fashionable and relevant topic at the time that Pushkin conceived and composed his tale.

Finding Peter in “The Queen of Spades” As generations of scholars have observed, the Countess is a representative of the Catherinian age, a relic of that glorious epoch captured by Pushkin in “To a Grandee.”44 But while it is certainly easy to discern elements of Catherine herself in the Countess of the 1760s, with her voluptuousness, her corruption, and the hints of much younger lovers, it is more of a challenge to discern Peter 42 Ibid., 660–61. 43 Ibid., 666. For more on the shifting iconography of power in these years, see Dixon, ­“Posthumous Reputation of Catherine II,” 646–79; Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Golburt, “Catherine’s Retinue,” 793n33. 44 For a number of commenters, the eighty-seven-year-old Countess is more than just a relic of a bygone age; her body, adornments, manner, and customs all refer to Catherine herself: Golburt reads her as a copy of the empress, whose very presence announces her as “an imitation of other aging aristocratic ladies and of the archetype of them all, Catherine the Great” (“Catherine’s Retinue,” 789). In particular, the focus on the Countess’s costume and its inappropriateness echoes “the satirical representations of Catherine II at the end of her reign,” when the sixty-year-old empress was depicted as “grotesque libertine” with her twenty-twoyear-old favorite Platon Zubov (792); Bethea discerns a connection between Pushkin’s description of the Countess’s household and his 1822 characterization of Catherine’s corrupt reign (“Taboo and the Family Romance,” 325); and Joanna Hubbs interprets the Countess as both the resplendent tsarina and the witch Baba Yaga (Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 218).

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in Pushkin’s tale. After all, there is no single character that embodies him or his era in the way that the Countess recalls Catherine. In fact, I would argue, Peter is not represented by a character but in the environment those characters inhabit: the century-old capital of Russia that bears Peter’s name. The P ­ etersburg of “Queen of Spades” dominates and structures the action; it is both the concrete locale through which Germann wanders, and a symbolic locus signaling the Petrine era of Russian history and providing a geographical link between historical ages. Given the dominant themes of the work—generational divide, social revolution, and the rise of a new class—the radical implications of this setting are relevant. In the early eighteenth century, the young city had been an unwanted and suspect interloper on Russian soil: an ideologically European newcomer bearing a Germanic name. In this sense, the city was a lot like Germann: an aspiring outsider whose German name bears out his non-Russian character. The city and the character are aligned: both are direct consequences of Peter’s reformist agenda. And the story’s opening scene, in which noble ­officers share a card table with a common-born engineer, presents the Petrine principle in action: Germann’s very presence at the table would be u­ nimaginable were it not for the radical leveling policies of Peter the Great. For Pushkin, Petersburg’s ascendancy over Moscow was emblematic of the new generation’s ascent over the old Muscovite aristocracy. In the “Moscow” chapter of the unpublished “Journey from Moscow to Petersburg,” Pushkin traces the contrasting fates of the rival capitals, explicitly equating the fading fortunes of Moscow with that of the nobility: “Peter the Great did not like Moscow [. . .] The fall of Moscow is the inevitable consequence of the rise of Petersburg. Two ­capitals cannot thrive at once in a single state, just as two hearts cannot coexist in the human body. But the impoverishment of Moscow is proof of something else: the impoverishment of the Russian nobility, resulting in part from the ­fragmentation of estates, which vanished at terrible speeds.”45 His assessment of Moscow’s certain displacement echoes the famous aphorism which opens the final chapter of “Queen”: “Two fixed ideas cannot coexist in the moral world, just as two bodies cannot occupy one and the same space in the physical world.”46 45 PSS, 11:247. 46 “Dve stolitsy ne mogut v ravnoi stepeni protsvetat’ v odnom i tom zhe gosudarstve, kak dva serdtsa ne sushchestvuiut v tele chelovecheskom” (ibid.); “Dve nepodvizhnye idei ne mogut vmeste sushchestvovat’ v nravstvennoi prirode, tak zhe, kak dva tela ne mogut v fizicheskom

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This adage, which the narrator employs to explain the relentlessness of Germann’s ambition, thus subtly recalls Pushkin’s larger p­ reoccupation with the rise of Petersburg and a new social class alongside the decline of Moscow and the ­hereditary nobility. The Moscow/Petersburg contrast is also implied earlier on, as la Vénus muscovite decays into a Petersburg crone:47 the degeneration of an entire class and era is condensed into a single transformation. Her deterioration offers a grotesque addendum to the ­panegyric section of The Bronze Horseman, in which the abandoned capital was r­ epresented as a fading dowager in purple, stooping before the newly crowned empress Petersburg. As we have seen, the setting of Petersburg—the rising city that displaced old Moscow—as well as the focus on Germann—a representative of the new class striving to enter high Petersburg society—serve to foreground Pushkin’s socio-political ideas on nobility, class, and autocracy. Peter might not be named, but his presence is implied through metonymy: Germann, natural heir to the tsar’s social restructuring, is caught up in a plot of social advancement in the city that bears his name. As numerous commenters have noted, Germann is looking for a key, not only to great wealth but to a world just beyond his grasp: he seeks admittance to the elite circles he doesn’t belong to but that he feels is his due.48 Perhaps it should come as no surprise to him, then, when the secret cards turn out to encode the starting point of the Petrine age: the ace, the seven, and the three, or 1-7-3, together enumerate the 1703 creation of Petersburg, the pinnacle act of the tsar’s transformative revolution. The cards promise more than wealth: they offer an almost literal—or, more precisely, symbolic—key to the city and society Germann so covets. In the national “family” of the Russian state, it had been common since at least the seventeenth century for the peasantry to refer affectionately to the tsar

mire zanimat’ odno i to zhe mesto” (PSS, 8:249). Hereafter in this chapter, references to volume 8 of the Polnoe sobranie, the volume which contains “The Queen of Spades,” will generally be identified within the text by page number only. 47 It is possible to discern the faint outlines of a folktale in the image of an old Petersburg witch (Germann calls her ved’ma) holding captive a young Muscovite beauty (the framed portrait of the Countess herself in her youth); the image of nobility held captive by a crass and inescapable Petersburg capitalism suggests a fairytale structure for the work’s social theme. 48 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 51; Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 15–16.

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as batiushka, or little father.49 This paternal metaphor was granted legitimacy in 1721, when Peter was officially styled Father of the Fatherland, a never-beforeused title offered in gratitude for his role in bringing a new Russia into being. This conventional metaphor of Peter as father achieves heightened relevance in a work that highlights the theme of patrimony (what you inherit and how you value it); one century after the death of this “little father,” Germann represents his spiritual “heir,” the natural beneficiary of the transformer-tsar’s ­eighteenth-century reforms.50 By encouraging social mobility, Peter had granted men of common birth, like Germann, access to education and the rewards of state service; with enough time and effort, such men might even rise to the level of the hereditary nobility in the Table of Ranks. An industrious and ambitious Russified European, Germann epitomizes the purpose and successes of the Petrine system. In the story, the young engineer carefully guards his ­patrimony (ottsovskoe nasledstvo), the 47,000 rubles left to him by his father, pledging to “triple his capital, increase it sevenfold” through his own three ­reliable cards: “calculation, moderation, and industry [raschet, umerennost’ i trudoliubie]” (235). It is not unlikely that these three values were handed down from Germann’s German father along with his small capital; Tomsky explains his friend’s unwillingness to gamble thus: “Germann is a German: he is thrifty [raschetliv], that’s all!” (227). In a larger historical sense, however, it is useful to view these gifts—or, more likely, these painstakingly developed behaviors—as the natural inheritance of the Petrine system; through these reliable “cards,” passed down by the benevolent tsar’-batiushka, Germann and other members of his class have risen—and will continue to rise—through the ranks of society. Germann isn’t just gambling his literal patrimony but his figurative, historical endowment as well: by casting aside his “Petri-mony”—his class’s three winning 49 Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 136. 50 Other scholars have also noted this link between Peter and Germann. According to ­Rosenshield, the socially striving young engineer “represents the true legacy of Peter the Great; he can be denied only temporarily” (Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 60). In A Raw Youth, Dostoevsky likewise drew attention to Germann as an embodiment of the Petrine ideal, calling Germann “a colossal figure, an extraordinary, completely Petersburg type—a type from the Petersburg period” of Russian history. See F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS), 30 vols., ed. V. G. Bazanov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), 13:113. For a psychoanalytic take on Germann as Petersburg “type,” see Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 58–62.

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cards of calculation, moderation, and industry—he is trying to bypass Peter’s carefully erected hierarchy and leap directly into the closed aristocratic circle at the top; he does not wish to join the fading nobles there, though, but to replace them. Although Germann has actually managed to attain for himself a position of relative social respect and security, he is driven to secure a family fortune that will be handed down through the generations:51 he argues his case to the Countess in the names of his future “children, grandchildren, and great-­ grandchildren” (242). His motivation, then, is not personal gain but a rupture in the social order that would put his own kind—both biologically and, by extension, socially—on top.

The Three, the Seven, and the Ace: Catherine’s Rival Code Germann is not satisfied with the Petrine method of social advancement, with its incremental gains over the course of generations. His aim is to ascend to the lofty echelons of the ancien régime, and he knows that he will never reach those heights by scaling Peter’s Table of Ranks, regardless of his thrift and self-discipline. In Tomsky’s anecdote, Germann recognizes an attractive alternative to the Petrine method: chance [sluchai]. The mysterious cards, of course, represent a rival model of social advancement: an opportunity to bypass the ladder completely and to be showered with overnight riches: in other words, the Catherinian method.52 Germann imagines the ancient Countess as a potential benefactress in the model of the famously lavish empress, and from the moment he hears the anecdote, he sets his sights on gaining his position instantly, according to the empress’s formula: to be chosen as her favorite and become an instant millionaire. His train of thought, with its nexus of sex, luck, and wealth, renders the associations with Catherine plain: “What if the old Countess revealed her secret to me? If she named her three reliable 51 Rosenshield also argues that Germann is gambling not for personal wealth, but rather for a fortune to pass on to his descendants (Challenging the Bard: Dostoevsky and Pushkin, a Study of Literary Relationship [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013], 171). 52 Wachtel has described Germann’s attraction to the Countess in terms of the distinct models of advancement in the Catherinian era vs. Pushkin’s own. As he notes, by the early nineteenth century, Germann’s characteristic middle-class values of diligence and frugality had nearly eclipsed the accidental fortunes made famous in Catherine's time; still, "everything in his nature and his background, from his engineering profession to his German blood, and including his desire to grow his already large capital by ‘calculation, moderation, and industry,’ are strikes against him in a world that still lives and dies by ancien regime codes relating to money” (Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 16–17).

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cards for me? Why shouldn’t I try my luck? ... I could be introduced to her, win her favor, become her lover if need be” (235). The secret cards are originally passed from the legendary mystic Saint-Germain to the Countess when her own place in society is jeopardized. That the Countess regains her position through fortuitous connections, deceit, and, presumably, sex p­ arallels Catherine II’s ascent to the throne; she also had no claim to Petersburg but rather gained her status the same way as the Countess: through luck, deceit, and c­ onnections to the right people (including the historical Saint-Germain)—and, presumably, through sex.53 The story thus dramatizes the clash between these two eighteenth-century modes of displacing the nobility: slowly but persistently, through hard work and talent (the Petrine method) or overnight, through luck and chance (the Catherinian method). If Germann weren’t so single-minded, he might have noticed that the two paths are mapped out for him by the onomastically linked Chaplitsky and Chekalinsky, whose stories provide instructive bookends for Germann’s own tale. In the opening section, Tomsky tells of a young man, ominously identified only as “the late Chaplitsky,” who had once lost 300,000 to a certain Zorich. In desperation, Chaplitsky appeals to the Countess. It is implied that he becomes the older woman’s lover in order to “win” the secret from her; he subsequently “die[s] in poverty, having squandered millions.” Chaplitsky’s brief rise and fall underscores the problem with Catherine’s system—luck runs out, and you don’t stay a favorite forever.54 At the far end of the story, the famous gambler Chekalinsky models the other option available to an ambitious young man of common birth. As Robin Aizlewood has argued, the dealer embodies the three qualities that Germann earlier identified as his reliable cards: “calculation, moderation, and industry.”55 Chekalinsky has built his reputation and his fortune according to the qualities associated with the Petrine mode of advancement: “he has only ever lost what he can afford, 53 Scholars have proposed several real-life society tales about winning cards as the basis of Pushkin’s story; in addition to the widely accepted anecdote involving the Princess ­Golitsyna and Saint-Germain, a similar one involves one of Catherine the Great’s own courtiers, P. B. Passek. See Debreczeny, Other Pushkin, 201; and M. I. Pyliaev, Staroe zhit’e: Ocherki i rasskazy (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1892), 28–29. 54 The moral of this cautionary tale is grounded in history: the real-life S. G. Zorich was a brazen Serbian war hero chosen as one of Catherine’s favorites in 1777 and dismissed after one year of “service” to the empress (Massie, Portrait of a Woman, 451–52). 55 Robin Aizlewood, “The Alter Ego and the Stone Guest: Doubling and Redoubling Hermann in The Queen of Spades,” in Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, 2:94.

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accepting IOUs but paying losses in cash; he has built up trust through his ‘long experience’; and in his calculating way he works hard on his public, what with his ‘famous chef ’ and his charming or ingratiating manner.”56 In short, the phonetic and narrative doubling of these two men seems intended to expose the endpoints of two alternate paths to wealth: one slow, successful rise, contrasted with a quick rise and an equally dramatic fall. It is natural that Pushkin’s inquiry into eighteenth-century power should open and close around a card table; after all, a deck of cards presents a neat model of the post-Petrine social hierarchy: an ascending numerical order, with the most powerful members ensconced in a palace at the top. As others have written, Germann is trying to scale this ladder, to become the metaphorical Ace (Tuz), which, in Russian slang, indicates a powerful man or boss.57 The Countess, of course, functions as his connection to this closed circle, his one chance to insert himself into the slim stack of face cards at the top of the deck. In the tale, the Countess is strongly associated with the Queen (Dama): there is the obvious physical doubling as she appears to wink at him from the card he pulls in place of the intended Ace; even earlier, however, her appearance in various frames—in her youthful, rose-bedecked portrait, in her mirror, against her high-backed Voltaire chair, and in her coffin— produces the impression of a bordered face card.58 With the Countess/Catherine installed as Queen, who in the tale ­constitutes her royal family? Certainly not the Countess’s husband, who “feared her like fire” and to whom his grandson refers as “a sort of butler” to his wife (rod babushkina dvoretskogo) (228). Though his portrait hangs beside hers on 56 Ibid. Of course, reading Chekalinskii’s story as an allegory of the Petrine model of stepby-step advancement is complicated, both by his luck-based profession (which is naturally more closely correlated with Catherine’s time) and by his association with the Countess and Saint-Germain: Chekalinskii is linked to Saint-Germain both temporally (he is now sixty years old, the same age as the anecdote; he could, as some scholars have suggested, be either the “natural” or symbolic son of his union with la Vénus moscovite) and physically (both are described as having a “respectable appearance” [pochtennaia naruzhnost’]). For more on the chronological and biological connections between Chekalinskii and Saint-Germain, see Aizlewood, “Alter Ego,” 93; Cornwell, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, 53–54. 57 J. Thomas Shaw argues that Germann’s ambition to become the Ace prefigures that card among the three that will “triple, increase sevenfold” his capital (“The ‘Conclusion’ of ­Pushkin’s Queen of Spades,” in Studies in Russian and Polish Literature: In Honor of Waclaw Lednicki, ed. Zbigniew Folejewski [The Hague: Mouton, 1962], 119). 58 Nathan Rosen, “The Magic Cards in The Queen of Spades,” Slavic and East European Journal 19, no. 3 (1975): 267–68.

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the wall, this recessive weakling seems less like a King than a Jack (in Russian, Valet); perhaps it is no coincidence that in French, valet refers to a man of low social rank, akin to a butler.59 No, the role of King is more likely fulfilled by Saint-Germain: after all, it is he who saved the Countess from social disgrace with his magic cards (and, allegedly at least, installed Catherine on the throne). It is also implied that he is the unnamed lover who, Germann imagines, descended the Countess’s black staircase sixty years earlier with his plumed haircut à l’oiseau royale (in Russian, the style sounds more kingly: korolevskoi ptitsei).60 (It is worth pointing out that the obvious twinning of Germann and Saint-Germain’s names marks the Count as another potential father figure for the young German, should he choose this new path of chance over the more reliable path of “calculation, moderation, and industry.”) This schema leaves the top spot open for Peter, a suitable position for the father of the social hierarchy, the builder of the Table of Ranks. Davydov famously discovered the Tuz tucked in between the Three and the Seven: “vot chto ustroit, usemerit moi kapital.”61 It is important to note, however, that this hidden Ace actually emerges as Germann is reflecting on the three reliable cards bequeathed by Peter himself: raschet, umerennost’ i trudoliubie. In other words, the Ace (Peter) is hiding within the three cards which, as I have argued, chart the nongentry’s slow and steady path up the Petrine ladder. By trying to be the Ace (a wealthy, important man), Germann—the representative of a new social force, made possible by the Petrine reforms—is essentially trying to usurp Peter’s place at the top of the hierarchy. The low-born Germann is enabled in his quest to scale the ranks by both “father” (Peter) and “mother” (Catherine).62 There is only one “deck,” but 59 It is worth noting that during Germann’s penultimate game of faro, his Seven beats a Jack; at this point, he has nearly gained access to the royal house! 60 Given the historical context, it is quite possible that his early morning descent is intended to imply not just sex but the coup d’état that installed Catherine II on the throne. Could this be the “terrible sin” (uzhasnyi grekh) that Germann detects on the Countess’s conscience? 61 Davydov, “Ace in ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 315. 62 If playing cards represent an allegory of the Russian state—a strict hierarchy, governed by chance and crowned by a lucky few—then it is no stretch to discern in the humanized face cards a representation of the imperial family, with tsar and tsaritsa at the top. Peter, as discussed above, was conventionally and formally recognized as the “father” of the empire; the empress was likewise traditionally hailed as its “little mother” (tsaritsa-matushka). Although Catherine actively cultivated an image as the direct heir to Peter’s cultural legacy,

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there exist two separate three-card tracks to the top: the Petrine legacy has allowed him—and other members of his class—to break free of his humble status and progress slowly up the social ladder, card by card as it were, abetted by his talent and ambition. Catherine, through her proxy the Countess, offers him something more seductive: a secret code allowing its bearer to bound to the top in three easy steps: toeholds at Three and Seven, then a comfortable landing at the Ace. His imperial “patrimony” thus bequeaths him a chance at a status; one which, if he scaled high enough, he might be able to hand down to his own sons. The Countess’s ghost offers something else: instant status, along with the hand of Liza—a new family line to go along with his newfound status, or a promise of matrimony. Germann, of course, throws away the patrimony—and not just the literal one, but his figurative, historical ­endowment, as well: his three “Petrine” cards and their promise of eventual wealth—in the hopes of something better (“the superfluous”). He chooses Catherine over Peter, and his choice is borne out in his apparent blunder: his choice of the Dama over the Tuz is his punishment for trading in his Petrine inheritance for the chance at a quicker Catherinian prize. Germann’s final words in the asylum—“Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!” (252)— recall his vacillation between tsars and their bequests—Peter! Catherine! Peter! Catherine!—even as their legacies continued to compete and alternate in nineteenth-century society. The final section of this chapter ties this reading—in which two different sets of cards represent two alternative modes of social advancement in postPetrine Russia—into the central themes of this study: animation/petrification in Petersburg, and the role of language in effecting the transition. The d­ iscussion in 1767 she rejected the title “Catherine the Great, Mother of the Fatherland.” Still, she enjoyed the maternal relationship she had with her subjects and was addressed affectionately as matushka (Massie, Portrait of a Woman, 384). Pushkin draws on this maternal imagery in The Captain’s Daughter, as Captain Mironov prepares the troops, whom he refers to as “little children” (detushki), to sacrifice themselves in the name of their “little mother” (see Bethea, “Taboo and the Family Romance,” 326). Catherine was matushka even to her lovers: Potemkin addresses her as “little mother” in his most passionate letters (Virginia Rounding, Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007]), an appellation that is somewhat incompatible with the popular image of the sexually voracious empress. Germann’s entreaties to the Countess similarly blur the boundaries between the maternal and the sexual, as he appeals to her in one breath as a “wife, mistress, [and] mother” (umoliaiu vas chuvstvami suprugi, liubovnitsy, materi [PSS, 8:241]).

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encompasses the semiotics of card games in nineteenth-century Petersburg society, a new iteration of the awakening statue, and the pivotal role they both play in Pushkin’s artistic exploration of the problem of animacy (spiritual, political, and otherwise).

Cards, Codes, and the Bronze Grandmaman: Animacy in “The Queen of Spades” In his landmark study of Russian card-game culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Lotman approaches card games as semiotic systems that model social (governmental, economic, political) structures.63 To explain the elevated status of cards and gambling in the culture and literature of that period, Lotman examines the shifting socio-political terrain of the time. As we have seen, by the late eighteenth century, a man’s place depended on the ­interaction of multiple factors: the hierarchy of rank was a well-established system, while kinship ties opened various paths of advancement besides the Table of Ranks; meanwhile, under Catherine II, the practice of favoritism ­introduced a note of unpredictability into the highly regulated mechanisms of state advancement.64 The collision of these competing systems—order vs. chaos, strategy vs. chance—naturally led to the equation of political life with a game of cards; in Lotman’s ingenious formulation, specific games correspond to various social systems: games of skill (such as whist) mirror the step-by-step advancement typical of meritocratic sluzhba, while games of pure luck (such as faro), with their heightened sense of unpredictability, produce the “accidental” windfalls characteristic of the Catherinian age.65

63 See Lotman, “‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart,” 392–400. See also Ian M. Helfant, The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), for an examination of the various social and literary codes implicated in the practice of gambling, as well as the broader societal preoccupation with chance. 64 Of course, Pushkin’s attitude toward Catherine and her policy of favoritism had been clear from his 1822 “Notes on Russian History of the Eighteenth Century”: “The very voluptuousness of this cunning woman consolidated her rule [. . .] one no longer needed brains, service, or talent to obtain the second place in the government” (PSS, 11:15). 65 “And if the operation of economic laws, calculation, and manufacturing toward the achievement of wealth were associated with games of skill, in which the way to win was calculation

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During this fertile period of the 1830s, as Pushkin endeavored to creatively reconstrue the previous century, he frequently contrasted the randomizing activity of chance (unpredictable, mobile) to the stasis of order (inflexible, immobile); he figured the enlivening influence of sluchai (chance, accident, opportunity) in various ways in his literary texts.66 In “Queen,” it is expressed in high-society card games; Lotman specifically attributes the popularity of faro to the stultifying grind of nineteenth-century Petersburg society: “In ­opposition to the thoroughly mechanical course of the predictable, dead life of St. ­Petersburg ‘society,’ faro presents a mechanism for introducing an element of choice, unpredictability, and de-automatization into everyday life.”67 Not surprisingly, the brash young officers of the tale gamble their fortunes at the faro table, while in a separate room the older, more established generals and privy councilors play risk-free hands of whist (249).68 However, casting the metaphysical activity of chance as a vitalizing force, capable of doing battle with the dead world of high society, would appear to be incompatible with the socio-historical assessment of “chance” in “The Queen of Spades,” with its strongly negative associations with Catherinian favoritism. What Germann perceives as a positive instance of sluchai—an opportunity to break out of and ability, then sudden and irregular enrichment [...] was seen as equivalent to Bank or Shtoss [faro]” (Lotman, “‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart,” 399). 66 Ibid., 408. See also Bethea, who attests that the notion of sluchai was an important recurring theme in Pushkin’s writings of the 1830s, particularly in his historical interpretations of the eighteenth century (Realizing Metaphors, 76), and who analyzes the role of sluchainost’ in Pushkin’s reconceptualization of history in the 1830s (David M. Bethea, “Slavic Gift Giving, The Poet in History, and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter,” in Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998], 269–70); and Svetlana Evdokimova, who explores the complexities and tensions of sluchai on the historical and personal planes (“Chance in History and in Private Life: The Captain’s Daughter,” in Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, 74–84). 67 Lotman, “‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart,” 409. In Lotman’s reading, “The Queen of Spades” concludes with the triumph of the automatic world, as the characters “find their place in the immobility of the cyclical repetitions of life” (Germann in a madhouse, Liza a society lady with a ward of her own, and Tomsky following the well-worn path of the young officer), and faro itself is revealed to be nothing more than a lifeless machine, characterized by “the false life of mechanical motion (right and left), and the ability to freeze and kill the soul” (ibid., 411–12). 68 Pushkin himself had a reputation as a lover (and frequent loser) of such high-risk card games, at least until his marriage in 1831. For more on Pushkin as a gambler, see Helfant, High Stakes, 51–53.

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Peter’s closed, automatic order—Pushkin reveals to be an inferior, unreliable, and ultimately ineffective practice; not true sluchai at all but the disruptive whims of a lustful empress. The Countess’s magical cards—and the chance at social mobility they appear to offer—are clearly in conflict with the city of Petersburg, whose origins in order and rigidity are preserved in its very name: etymologically, Petersburg is a city of stone, its petrified creator memorialized at its center.69 Paradoxically, the glorious new capital, carefully arranged around the Neva, was in many ways the embodiment of Peter’s revolution: conceived and built during the ­reformer-tsar’s extraordinary three-decade transformation of tradition-bound medieval Muscovy into a modern European state, the city originally r­epresented change, progress, and the inversion of the old order. This glorious monument to revolution soon solidified into an inflexible new status quo, however, as the new structures of social position and advancement (the Table of Ranks) became rigid and mechanical. By Pushkin’s time, the city exerted an ossifying force, metaphorically turning its men to stone; both of Pushkin’s Petersburg works feature the petrification of their heroes: the parodic horseman Evgenii sits astride his stone lion, “motionless [. . .] as though chained to the marble” (141– 42), while Germann turns to stone [okamenel] (240) in the study as he awaits the Countess. In “The Queen of Spades,” Pushkin reveals the city’s resistance to change in a number of ways. The ring structure of the story—which opens and closes on a group of officers playing cards—bares the inescapable cyclicality of Petersburg society. Meanwhile, members of high society act according to long-established (and long-empty) custom: the Countess adorns and paints her ancient flesh according to the previous century’s fashion; she drags herself to balls and receives unrecognized guests, “as etiquette decreed”; and they in turn bow before this relic “as if performing an established rite.” Characters might seek an exit from these set and cyclical expectations—Liza even consents to a midnight rendezvous with a dangerous, unknown engineer—but in the end, even the dreamers wind up following the well-worn tracks laid out for 69 The name Peter derives from the Greek petros, meaning stone, an etymological link that would have been familiar to Pushkin from the French Pierre (Peter; stone). Thus, while the city was officially named in honor of the tsar’s patron saint, it also broadcast the audacious materials of its construction: it is a stone city, set down on a Finnish swamp as if in defiance of the rules of nature.

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them by custom. At the story’s end, following Germann’s downfall, we learn that the fatal card game “resumed its usual course”; it appears that Petersburg society—enacted, as always, at the card table—simply expels those players who refuse to play their established role and continues on. If St. Petersburg, with its mixed legacy of renewal and rigidity, provided a hospitable environment for Pushkin to investigate chance and order, the s­ pectral city provided an equally suitable space for the poet to explore the opposition of animate and inanimate. As Roman Jakobson reveals in his seminal study of ­Pushkin’s “sculptural myth,” this opposition between dead/living represented a fundamental structural principle of the poet’s works of the 1830s: Jakobson ­identifies three “destructive statues” who serve as the title characters of Pushkin’s final works in the genres of drama, poema, and fairytale: The Stone Guest, The Bronze Horseman, and “The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel.”70 Although he limits his catalogue of animated statues to vengeful male figures, there has been no shortage of scholars claiming a place for “The Queen of Spades” within his schema: Lotman and Wachtel both note that the title alone clinches its position among those other works, whose sculptural villains blend inanimate material (stone, bronze, gold) with flesh (guest, horseman, c­ockerel).71 The most famous of ­Pushkin’s living statues is the implacable monument to Peter in The Bronze Horseman; in the period leading up to the poem’s composition, however, his letters likewise make repeated reference to an oppressive “Bronze G ­ randmother”—a 70 Each of these works features a male protagonist whose simple dreams are thwarted by the eponymous figure. The poet’s intense preoccupation with these relentless authoritarian figures falls into a period of his life (1830–34) during which he was forced to contend with his own set of authority figures, both personal (his father and mother-in-law), political (his personal censor, Nicholas I, along with his official agent Count Benckendorff), and historical (his increasingly complicated 1830s relationship to Peter I and Catherine II). For a full analysis of the sculpture and its vivification in Pushkin’s oeuvre, see Jakobson, “Statue in Puškin’s Poetic Mythology,” 1–44. See also Bethea, who challenges Jakobson’s restriction of the sculptural metaphor to punishing male figures, postulating a complementary Pygmalion myth that permeates and animates the poet’s oeuvre (Realizing Metaphors, 89–117). 71 Lotman later isolates the elements that compose the paradigmatic triangular relationship of Jakobson’s plan, which may then be applied to “The Queen of Spades”—rebellious element (Germann), inexorable statue (Countess/Queen), human victim (Liza) (Universe of the Mind, 82–86)—while Aizlewood reads “Queen” as a complex reworking of The Stone Guest, complete with its own crucial instance of petrification and revivification (Alter Ego, 95–99). See also Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 19–20n17; and Cornwell, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, 70.

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giant bust of Catherine the Great owned by the Goncharov family, which Pushkin believed would need to be melted down and sold in order to provide Natalia Goncharova an adequate trousseau for marriage.72 Given Pushkin’s association of Catherine with both the fictional Countess who thwarts Germann’s advance (in her guise as the mocking Queen of Spades), and with the real-life sculptural impediment to his own marriage, it is certainly no stretch to read The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades” as companion pieces of Petersburg lore, complementary tales of two young men, one highborn and one common-born, both victims of the ever-present and inexorable bronze sovereigns of the city. Of course, the Catherine of “Queen” is ultimately represented not by a bust but by a face card; and while a playing card might not project the obvious physical power of a statue, it is nonetheless an inanimate image, associated with a specific past monarch, which comes to life in order to impede the hero’s plans. In view of this chain of associations (Pushkin’s obsession with the historical legacy of the eighteenth century; card games as analogues of social structures; Pushkin’s “sculptural myth” and the broader theme of animacy), perhaps it should come as no surprise that this historical duo—Horseman and Grandmother of bronze—should be cast together as the ruling pair in the fatal deck of cards dealt to Germann: the Emperor (Ace) and Empress (Queen) of Spades. While both Petersburg tales feature the sudden awakening of an immobile monarch-idol, the act of animation is not quite as straightforward as is immediately apparent. In “The Queen of Spades,” characters fall into the essential categories of alive (warm, mobile) or dead (cold, immobile); their passage from one state to the other (from “animate” to “inanimate,” for instance) may be 72 In 1830 letters to Benckendorff and Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin refers to the figure variously as “La statue colossale [. . .] en bronze,” “la Grand’maman de bronze,” and “Mednaia babushka” (PSS, 14:95; 14:103; 14:115–16). Also note that, in apparent contradiction to his insistence on the exclusive masculinity of the sculptural theme, Jakobson discusses at length Pushkin’s association between Catherine and statues—and particularly this instance of his marriage’s apparent dependence on a bust of the empress. Epistolary evidence also leads Jakobson to speculate that it was Pushkin’s contemplation of this burdensome sculpture that eventually resulted in his composition of “My Genealogy,” in which the author “emphatically dates the submission of his rebellious family from the imprisonment of his grandfather, who had resisted Catherine’s palace revolution, just as his earlier ancestor, Fedor Puškin, had opposed Peter I and had been executed at his command” ( Jakobson, “Statue in Puškin’s Poetic Mythology,” 17–18).

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signaled through changes in temperature (from warm to cold) or mobility (from movement to immobility). For instance, the Countess, who was once “hot” in her (Parisian) youth (her husband “feared her like fire”; Saint-­ Germain found her “in a fever” [v uzhasnom gore]) has become “cold” in her ­(Petersburgian) old age (she refuses to go out in the cold; she displays “cold egoism” [kholodnyi egoizm]; guests press the cold hand of her corpse); ­nonetheless, she still dresses in “flame-colored ribbons,” as if to recall (or feign) her vital youth.73 The young Liza, by contrast, is still warm (she is unlike those other “cold” society ladies; she does not answer Germann coldly; that she needs only a light [kholodnyi] jacket in the storm testifies to her body’s natural warmth).74 Germann, as always, occupies an intermediate space: he is ­identified as both hot (he has a fiery [ognennoe] imagination and ardent [plamennye] demands; wine further inflames [goriachilo] his imagination after the funeral) and cold (Liza turns cold at the mention of his name at the ball; he is physically associated with both the cold stove and the cold floor [“German stoial, ­prislonias’ k kholodnoi pechke” (240); “On poklonilsia v zemliu, i neskol’ko minut lezhal na kholodnom polu” (247)]; he makes his final bets cold-­ bloodedly [s khladnokroviem]).75 Over the course of the six decades covered in the story, the Countess slowly passes from life into death (as signaled by her transition from hot to cold, and from mobility to stillness). This is no simple one-way transition, however; after her death, the Countess appears to Germann three times: she winks at him from her coffin, pays a visit to his room late one night, and winks at him once again in the form of the Queen of Spades (this time leaving him “motionless”).76 Even before this climactic reanimation, though, the Countess figuratively passes back and forth between the realms of the animate and the inanimate, as though the two states were permeable and impermanent. As Lotman notes, the Countess’s passage from life to death and back again is signaled in the text long before her physical death. Over the course of a single scene, she appears to make the journey multiple times: as she sat alone in her boudoir, her dim eyes were “empty of thought” as she swayed right and left, as though impelled “by the action of a hidden galvanism”; when Germann appeared, her eyes “lit up” as “an inexpressible change came over her 73 PSS, 8:228–29, 233, 245. 74 Ibid., 234, 237, 239. 75 Ibid., 235, 244, 247, 243, 240, 247, 251. 76 Ibid., 8:252.

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lifeless face.” The cyclic absence and renewal of her senses signals the status of her animacy: at first she “did not seem to hear him”; soon, “her features betrayed a profound stirring of her heart,” but she soon “relapsed into her former numbness”; she remained silent until, at the sight of his pistol, her features again “betrayed strong emotion”; her final silence announced her physical death.77 What could be the cause of the Countess’s apparently reversible animacy? In the present day, she is depicted as being practically dead: a grotesque ­ornament of a bygone age, whose contemporaries have all died, and who herself, in Germann’s fiery imagination, “may die in a week—in a couple of days!” (235). The first hints of life in this misshapen old hag—the flashes of recognition in her eyes, the evident agitation in her heart—appear only when Germann arrives to demand the magical cards. Could the three cards—the same cards that restored her position in society sixty years earlier—now be restoring her to some state of life? Such an interpretation is consistent with Slonimsky’s metrical interpretation of the magical cards—“troika, semerka i tuz,” first articulated by the Countess and obsessively repeated by Germann— as a poetic incantation, capable of transforming the surrounding prose into similarly poetic lines (such as the dactyl “eti tri vernye karty”).78 These cards, and the secret encoded in them, affect more than the rhythms of the adjacent narrative: indeed, proximity to the secret cards appears to have an enlivening influence on their human pursuers as well. The anecdote alone is certainly enough to inflame the imagination of the young Germann, activate his latent passionate side, and set his plot in motion; just as the Countess lurches briefly back to life, the cold-blooded engineer is likewise animated by the prospect of the three cards. 77 PSS, 8:240–42. In Lotman’s words, “The transition from insensitivity, immobility, ­mechanicity, and death to excitement, inner movement, life, and back again, takes place several times during this scene” (“‘Pikovaia dama’ i tema kart,” 410). Lotman’s observation is consistent with Bethea’s contention that the sculptural myth is double-sided (“Why the Statue Won’t Come to Life,” in Realizing Metaphors, 89–117 (particularly 107); indeed, in Robert Reid’s words, perhaps “Pushkin’s myth in general contains this potential for ­reversibility [. . .] Between mortification and animation, rigidity and freedom, past and present, authority and autonomy, Pushkin seeks less to choose than to conditionally emphasize. The myths themselves remain animate through this very refusal of closure” (introduction to Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, 2:4). 78 A. L. Slonimskii, “O kompozitsii ‘Pikovoi damy,’” in Pushkinskii sbornik pamiati Professora S. A. Vengerova (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 171–80; Debreczeny, Other Pushkin, 219.

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As Germann prepares for his fatal meeting with the Countess, he u­ ndergoes the same vacillation between life and death as she will in the following scene: outside the house, he “tremble[s] like a tiger,” but “feel[s] neither wind nor snow”; as he waits inside, his heart beat[s] evenly, until an “involuntary a­ gitation seize[s] him”; as the Countess and her ward enter, something “stir[s] in his heart” just before he stands “petrified” (239–40). It is undoubtedly significant that for both recipients of the secret, this long vacillation concludes in death, either figurative—Germann “turning to stone” (okamenel) in the study—or literal—the dead Countess sitting “like a stone” in her chair (Mertvaia starukha sidela okamenev). While the secret (or the promise of it) might appear to grant vitality—an unnaturally long life; a fiery, ardent heart—these two characters’ long oscillation between life and death, capped by a pair of petrifactions, betrays the falseness of this animating force. Underneath the rose-bedecked wigs and sparkling eyes, these two are as dead as the stones of the city, unnaturally animated by a force that directs Germann’s feet through the city streets and galvanizes the Countess’s side-to-side swaying. What is it about the cards that bestows life (or what passes for it) on its holders? It is important to recall that Russian playing cards of the early ­nineteenth century were not represented numerically, as they are now, but v­ isually, in images: the three of hearts was signified not by the number three but by three red hearts, arrayed from top to bottom.79 It would have been easy for such concrete images to become embodied as other beings or objects in an ardent young officer’s ­imagination; in fact, however, the creative incarnation of the Countess’s cards is more complicated than that. Cards were represented not only visually but verbally, in a sequence of “numerical nouns” lexicalized from collective numerals (troika, semerka), some of which refer to specific objects—a troika is a three-horse carriage—and all of which are perceived more as names (of buses, cards, or grades) than as numbers per se. It is this dual graphic-oral representation that allows Germann to see a shapely (stroinaia) girl and, through auditory ­association, think of the three (troika) of hearts—which then, thanks to its pictorial s­ ilhouette, blossoms into a flower in his dreams.80 The sequence, then, is also one of ­deanimation and reanimation: a living being (girl) is reduced to verbal ­representation (troika), 79 See images in Davydov, “Ace in ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 318. 80 Adapted from Rosen, “Magic Cards,” 262; and Davydov, “Ace in ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 315–16.

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which Germann’s obsessive ­imagination reconstrues as a visual symbol (three hearts arranged in a shapely line), then creatively reembodies as another being (flower). This back-and-forth pattern of incarnation—in another instance, a round-bellied man becomes an Ace (tuz, represented by a single club or spade), which then spreads its limbs to become a spider—follows the same model as other instances of animation/petrification in Petersburg: the Countess and Germann, both of whom move from death to life and back again over the course of the story. Ultimately, then, “The Queen of Spades”—the twisty tale and the winking object alike—provides insight into the slippery boundary between animacy and inanimacy in Peter’s stone capital. In 1703, Peter legendarily called P ­ etersburg into being with his chaos-defeating “Let there be,” an event Pushkin had only just memorialized in The Bronze Horseman. The year would mark a decisive turning point in Russian history—the end of the medieval Moscow era and the start of the modern Petersburg age—and the new capital provided a hospitable environment for the reformer-tsar’s overarching project to cut away the immobilizing roots of tradition, pivot toward the West, and erect a new ladder to social freedom and mobility. Sixty years after the Petrine fiat, a German princess ascended the Russian throne; she consolidated Peter’s reforms and cast herself as his legitimate successor, but carved some detours and diversions into his methodical system of advancement, promising tempting new possibilities for a few lucky subjects. In Pushkin’s tale, the young Countess’s precarious position in society is stabilized through the intervention of Saint-Germain and his magical cards; as we have seen, this secret social campaign represents Catherine’s clandestine coup and rise to power. ­Catherine’s reign is thus represented by the numerical sequence 3-7-1—a reversal of the order that encodes the birth of the city (1-7-3). Catherine II radically rewrote history in order to force her way into the royal succession; likewise, the secret code that restores the ambitious young Countess represents something of a rival legacy: a literal overturning of the order that had rigidified since Peter’s radical age. (The sequence itself means nothing on its own; it simply represents the reversal of Peter’s order and an accelerated track to the top.) This is c­ onsistent with Lotman’s interpretation of the story, in which the Petrine system of incremental, merit-based movement up the Table of Ranks ­ (emblematized by skill-based games like whist) is in

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competition with the sudden hierarchical change offered by Catherine II’s favoritism (or by games like faro). In “Queen,” the Countess’s cards grant the Petersburg equivalent of “life”: material wealth and its attendant social status. This “life,” however, is only ­illusory: the cards’ holders might seem alive—their hearts might pound, their bright eyes glitter at the thought of their imminent fortune—but in the end they are revealed to be as dead and rigid as the stone city that surrounds them. In historical terms, Catherine might have dangled a chance at riches before her rapt admirers, but her legacy reveals the emptiness of her policies: Peter’s order may have been unnatural (as Pushkin insinuates in The Bronze Horseman), but what Catherine offered in its place was cynical, corrupt, and arbitrary. With some persuasion, the Countess eventually bequeaths Germann the winning “code”; but if the cards are capable of granting their possessor some approximation of life, why do their next two bettors—Chaplitsky and ­ Germann—die in poverty or madness? Germann’s inadvertent choice of the wrong card—the Queen over the Ace, or Catherine over Peter—is an apt punishment for trying to upjump the step-by-step hierarchy that was his natural patrimony. He, or at least his children, would have gotten there eventually; his 47,000 was not an insubstantial sum at that time, and by playing his Petrine hand wisely, Germann would have risen in the hierarchy and positioned his own sons well.81 It is true that the upstart overshoots, trying to insert himself into a system he neither belongs to nor fully understands—and what’s more, trying to become the Ace.82 More to the point, though, he is playing the wrong game: faro is a game of pure chance, associated with eighteenth-century ­aristocratic culture, and played by men with unlimited funds. Whist (which was being offered in a different room at Chekalinsky’s salon) would have been better suited to his station: with his capacity for calculation and thrift, he certainly would have defeated those extravagant, flighty aristocrats at their own game. In the end, Germann is punished for abandoning the Petrine patrimony in favor of 81 For more on the value of 47,000 rubles in Pushkin’s time, see Wachtel, “Rereading ‘The Queen of Spades,’” 14–15. 82 In one sense, he actually achieves his goal: by the nineteenth century, the Ace could be either high or low: its defeat of the Queen might be read to signal its ascendancy (the restoration of Peter’s order in the face of social and political threats); the iconography of the card, however— a lone figure on a sterile square field—represents what Germann actually gains: solitary confinement.

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a corrupt Catherinian fortune: the ambitious officer risks certain advancement for a chance to soar right to the top; historically speaking, however, it is not yet his turn, and his lust for instant access renders him verbally and socially ­impotent. Pushkin had no doubt that the Germanns of the world would soon replace him and his class; they are already waiting in the shadows, watching as the wealthy fritter away their wealth. And if this one had only played the hand he was dealt by Peter, even Pushkin himself could not have slowed his advance. Without doubt, the tale of an ambitious social striver, his ascent facilitated by Peter’s legacy and accelerated by Catherine’s corrupt and arbitrary partiality, betrays Pushkin’s anxieties about what’s coming to displace him. As Pushkin well understood, Germann’s challenge to the system is not just personal, for his own profit; as Rosenshield explains, his advance “is also social and political, and it is precisely the social and political ramifications of Germann that Pushkin attempts to repress.”83 Rosenshield argues that Pushkin deals Germann the wrong cards.84 In fact, Germann holds all the right cards: as Pushkin ­understood all too well, the city could—and should—have been his! Germann may have lost this game, but his class will play on and, inexorably, triumph. In reality, Pushkin was powerless to stop the slow, steady rise of the Germanns of the world: through their industry and moderation, they were on their way up. It is hard to imagine someone as coolheaded and calculating as our hero slipping up and drawing the wrong card, but he has help from his jealous author, who dreaded the rise and intrusion of Germann’s class, regardless of their method of advancement. Pushkin knows that the Germanns of the world will prevail, but he is not above stopping this one in his tracks. Germann isn’t the only one punished: the aristocracy is shown to be morally and spiritually bankrupt, and by the story’s conclusion, the grotesque Catherine figure has likewise been killed off. And although the mighty Tuz is left standing at the end, even the legacy of Peter has been tarnished: his once-revolutionary city has ossified into a set of fixed roles and routines; his spiritual heir has been locked away, having rejected the Petrine inheritance in favor of Catherinian sluchai; and the officers’ game of faro is calmly resumed, this time without the gatecrashing engineer. Pushkin’s social demise may be 83 Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness, 60. 84 Ibid.

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inescapable, but he nonetheless achieves a preemptive poetic strike. Ultimately, Pushkin’s treatment of his literary characters betrays more than his anxiety over the displacement of his ancient class and anger at the Romanovs who, with their eighteenth-century reforms and machinations, enabled it; he also betrays his own desire for acceptance in the closed world of the ancien regime. Where do the author’s sympathies lie? Is Pushkin really any closer to the flighty ­aristocrats he depicts than he is to the outsider Germann? Ironically, Pushkin covets the same thing Germann does: fabulous wealth and an esteemed ­position; only he believes he can actually lay claim to it—for unlike this ­European arriviste, the poet believes himself to be a legitimate heir.

Zakliuchenie: The Poetic Word in Pushkin’s Petersburg Tales Before turning to Gogol—whose exploration of the Petersburg theme in his own tales will both build on Pushkin’s model and turn it on its head—it is worth comparing the treatment of Peter and the Petersburg logos (the ­intersections of language and power) in The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades.” In both Petersburg povesti, Pushkin’s representation of Peter the Great is equivocal. In The Bronze Horseman, Peter’s reforms had brought about the social marginalization of the clerk Evgenii—whose once-­ illustrious family name has been obscured by the historical processes he unleashed—while his metallic proxy keeps watch over the city, silencing any sign of protest. On balance, the tsar’s legacy in “Queen” (however hidden) appears to be depicted in a more positive light than in the earlier poem— particularly by comparison with Catherine, whose corrupt rule and grotesque body are more obviously displayed in its pages. He is shown, however, to have accomplished something equally blameworthy: the same policies that set in motion the decline of the aristocracy also abetted the rise of a hungry new social class, exemplified by the tale’s common-born hero. And the same Germanic orientation and w ­ esternizing tendencies that resulted in the ascent of this German engineer led as well to the German princess who married Peter’s sole surviving grandson; both Germann and Catherine, then, are direct—if unintended—consequences of the Petrine reforms. In “Queen,” the role and function of the logos is complex. The specific cards Pushkin chooses for his anecdote (1-7-3) encode Peter’s verbal creation

Gambling Away the Petri-mony

of his city; while it might seem like a stretch to link a numerical sequence with the tsar’s originating Word, it should be recalled that Pushkin had only just poetically represented the 1703 founding of Petersburg as a radical verbal act, in which city emerges fully formed from Peter’s “Let there be.” Of course, the cards are not represented in the text this way, but as the Countess’s verbal formula “troika-semerka-tuz” (3-7-1)—a sequence that signifies nothing on its own, but within the context of Pushkin’s artistic reappraisal of eighteenth-­ century power denotes Catherine’s overturning of Peter’s “order.” Given Pushkin’s animosity toward the empress, it is fitting that the sequence encoding her legacy is backward and meaningless, reflecting her own less successful attempt to transform Russian government and society—which really amounted only to a reorganization of the preexisting order, and which the bitter Pushkin would have perceived as illegitimate and retrograde. (Perhaps, too, this “backward code” mirrors the “backward chain” of revolutionary eras represented in the story, from the Decembrists’ failed rebellion through Catherine’s midnight coup, all the way back to Peter, revolutionary father and indomitable “Ace” of modern Russian society.) The “troika, semerka, i tuz” formulation also represents Germann’s own “word,” as the historically inconsequential upstart attempts to grab hold of a code that will enable him to write his own future (and that of his grandsons). When repeated in sequence, the secret cards appear to possess some i­ncantatory power to bring life to their holders; this “life,” however, proves short-lived and illusory: the promise of wealth and a permanent place in the social order might cause the analytical engineer’s heart to pound, but he still ends the tale in textual petrification and social isolation. The cards, too, undergo their own act of “animation,” taking on petals and flesh in Germann’s fevered imagination to move from the symbolic realm (a trio of hearts) to the corporeal (flower). But whereas Germann fails to effect in real life the “animation” promised in the cards’ visuo-verbal codes, for his author, the cards—with their unique merging of graphic and lexical representation—offer an opportunity to examine shifts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of power. Recall that such a union of the visual and the verbal had been typical of the pre-Petrine age, before the tsar rent word from image; as we have seen, the visual element remained ­dominant through the eighteenth century until it finally succumbed in the early nineteenth to the more purely verbal forms of representation promoted by

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Peter. Germann’s schizophrenic zakliuchenie (the double entendre with which Pushkin signaled both the conclusion of his tale and his characters’ confinement) may be profitably interpreted within this broader understanding of icon and logos. In “The Queen of Spades,” images—portraits, playing cards, painted faces, etc.—are all signifiers of the eighteenth century and its power structures, while the omniscient narrative itself is clearly a product of the ­nineteenth; indeed, the Countess expresses astonishment that Russian novels even exist— as Gary Saul Morson points out, the Russian literary language had only been cobbled together “at about the time that would have coincided with the countess’s childhood.”85 While one century (the tale’s “sixty years earlier”) is still legible through images and portraiture, the other is construed through text alone, whether novel, letter, epigraph, or povest’. Germann’s failed attempt at synthesizing eighteenth-century political power (iconized in the playing cards’ hearts and spades) with nineteenth-century narrative power (the incantatory anecdote) results in breakdown, both psycho-social and linguistic. Pushkin, by contrast, successfully draws on, integrates, and ironizes various literary tropes of Classicism and European Romanticism in his exploration of Enlightenmentera political power, whose own zakliuchenie hinges on a single card (a face card which, perhaps not coincidentally, consists of both letter—Д—and visual portrait). Ultimately, Peter’s Word has been quite literally overturned, though his “son” (the historical beneficiary of his meritocratic and westernizing policies) has overreached, failing—with a little help from his anxious author—in his bid to claim it. Meanwhile, by successfully reintegrating visual icon and verbal narrative, Pushkin has proved himself worthy of inheriting the creative word. By comparison with “The Queen of Spades,” where Germann, the Countess, and even the cards themselves move in and out of life as Germann incants the magical code, The Bronze Horseman relates a sequence of seemingly more straightforward acts of verbal animation: Peter calls forth a city from chaos; the defiant Evgenii calls down Peter from his pedestal. In fact, however, the line between the animate and inanimate is shown to be as permeable in the poem as in “Queen.” Here, too, each of the participants moves twice: out of an original, 85 Gary Saul Morson, ed., Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 23.

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“natural” state and back again. Peter, for instance, begins as an active hero (in the creation scene), becomes petrified (during his “eternal rest” as the Bronze Horseman), and springs suddenly back to life (during the confrontation scene). Conversely, Evgenii begins the poem in a passive state (reflecting, dreaming, frozen on the lion), moves into an active state (circling the pedestal of the Bronze Horseman and issuing his challenge to the tsar), then finally retreats back into apparent passivity. The Neva likewise begins as a passive “victim” of Peter’s reforms, rears up into activity, then subsides into harmlessness. The return of autumn’s gales, however, warns of future turmoil: these interlocking cycles of life and death, creation and destruction, the poem implies, will continue to revolve. It is not only the city’s occupants that undergo this transient animation or deanimation—in both works, the city, once born of the creative Word of Peter, itself submits to a poetic petrification. In The Bronze Horseman, a poem characterized by motion,86 the once-vibrant hundred-year-old city has ­ ­immobilized into a monument to stasis and stone; and in “Queen of Spades,” the city is populated by well-preserved relics endlessly reenacting the same social customs and plots. Both texts memorialize the moment when a young man—one a disenfranchised member of the ancient aristocracy, the other from the ascendant bourgeois class—attempts to upend the inflexible power ­structure of Petersburg by challenging Peter’s Word and pronouncing his own, either to bring down the tyrant (uzho tebe) or to displace him (troika, semerka, tuz). Both men fail in their bids (though Evgenii’s curse reveals the tsar’s ­instability), but by bringing these rebellious heroes to life, Pushkin has ­demonstrated the animating power of his own literary word. By the early ­nineteenth century, Peter’s city—his Word incarnate—may have rigidified into an inflexible order, but in these works Pushkin reanimates it in prose and poetic word; just as Evgenii and Germann move from death to life and back again, so is Petersburg written back into literary life.

86 Paul Call, “Puškin’s Bronze Horseman: A Poem of Motion,” Slavic and East European Journal 11, no. 2 (1967): 137–44.

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3 Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself Nevsky Prospect as the Hellmouth of Gogol’s Petersburg

Nearly five years before Pushkin wrote his Petersburg tales, an eighteen-year-old Ukrainian—untitled and unknown, but deeply ambitious—arrived in St. ­Petersburg, ready to make his name in the capital city. The young Gogol had fantasized his arrival in the dazzling metropolis—and his ensuing rise to fame— for years;1 he even set himself a route that bypassed Moscow, “so as not to ruin the first impression of his triumphant advent in Petersburg.”2 ­Needless to say, his wildly inflated expectations deflated abruptly on his arrival; his first letter home, in January 1829, expresses scornful disillusionment: “Petersburg struck me not at all as I expected; I imagined it as much more b­ eautiful and magnificent, and the rumors that others have spread are likewise false.”3 A few months later, Gogol elaborated his disenchantment with the city: he found it unexpectedly quiet; its inhabitants lacked spirit (dukh); they squandered their lives in meaningless state service. And worst of all, the city possessed no national character: “the foreigners   1 As he wrote in a February 1827 letter to his mother, “Asleep or awake, I am always dreaming of Petersburg” (N. V. Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. N. L. Meshcheriakov, 14 vols. [Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1937–52], 10:83). Hereafter, references to Gogol’s Polnoe sobranie will be cited as PSS, with volume and page number separated by a colon.   2 Sergei Davydov, “Gogol’s Petersburg,” New England Review (1990–) 27, no. 1 (2006): 122.   3 PSS, 10:136–37 (letter from January 3, 1829).

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

who settled here have made themselves at home and are not like foreigners at all, and the Russians in turn have ‘­foreignized,’ and are no longer either one or the other.”4 His assessment h­ ighlights the unusual slipperiness of the capital—it is a space of shifting i­dentities and unstable boundaries—and the city’s very elusiveness, its ­lifelessness, its eerie soullessness, all had demonic implications which would be expressed in his later writings.5 Regardless, Gogol was intent on making his mark in the imperial capital, whatever the venue: the civil service, the lecture hall, the stage, and the printed page were deemed equally likely to bring recognition, and it was only when he had failed as a bureaucrat, a lecturer, an actor, and a poet in turn that Gogol fully devoted himself to prose. A “Little Russian” outsider within imperial Russian culture, Gogol set out to season his art to suit the literary tastes of the capital, carefully selecting themes that would feed the appetite for Ukrainian folk culture he had noticed among contemporary Petersburgers. His first story collection, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, ushered him into the city’s elite literary circles and introduced him to its leading luminaries, including his longtime idol Pushkin.6 In letters and reminiscences, Gogol represented the “Russian national poet” as something of a mentor-figure; of course, the young Ukrainian had a personal and professional stake in linking his name to that of Russia’s leading   4 PSS, 10:139 (letter from April 30, 1829): “Петербург вовсе не похож на прочие столицы европейские или на Москву. Каждая столица вообще характеризуется своим народом, набрасывающим на нее печать национальности, на Петербурге же нет никакого характера: иностранцы, которые поселились сюда, обжились и вовсе не похожи на иностранцев, а русские в свою очередь объиностранились и сделались ни тем ни другим. Тишина в нем необыкновенная, никакой дух не блестит в народе, всё служащие да должностные, все толкуют о своих департаментах да коллегиях, всё подавлено, всё погрязло в бездельных, ничтожных трудах, в которых бесплодно издерживается жизнь их. Забавна очень встреча с ними на проспектах, тротуарах; они до того бывают заняты мыслями, что поровнявшись с кем-нибудь из них слышишь, как он бранится и разговаривает сам с собою, иной приправляет телодвижениями и размашками рук.”   5 See Julian Graffy, “The Devil Is in the Detail: Demonic Features of Gogol’s Petersburg,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 243–48.   6 In fact, Gogol had attempted to make Pushkin’s acquaintance shortly after his arrival in Petersburg but was turned away at the door (the poet was allegedly still asleep after an all-night game of cards). See Stephen Moeller-Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 18. For more on Gogol’s uneasy position in Petersburg literary salons, see Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 170–73.

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littérateur, through whose influence he might inscribe his own name into the literary tradition.7 Though his public rhetoric was reverent, Gogol m ­ eticulously differentiated himself from the older poet in both form and style: he borrowed freely from him, but only in order to radically—and astonishingly—transform.8 In An Author’s Confession (1847), Gogol insisted that Pushkin had given him the idea for both The Inspector General and Dead Souls (and for his part, Pushkin is reported to have responded with good humor: “‘That crafty, crafty Ukrainian, he’s stolen my poem, but it doesn’t matter; he made a good thing of it; I couldn’t have begun to depict ‘The Adventures of Chichikov’ the way he’s done’”).9 Well before these pilfered plots, however, Gogol had inherited something else from his master: the well-defined contours of a textual Petersburg. The budding writer’s earliest appraisals of his new city—a silent and ­illusory kingdom, through which soulless and half-mad functionaries march in lock-step, talking and gesticulating to themselves—indicate that a Gogolian Petersburg had been taking shape within months of his arrival.10 Nonetheless, the appearance in 1833 of The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades” offered a model of what would soon become a multiauthored city text, as ­Pushkin’s prototype was renovated and elaborated by his eager and ambitious protégé, whose own Petersburg tales began to appear in 1835. Gogol’s ­“Petersburg tales”—five stories that take place in Petersburg and collectively offer a sketch of the young city—were not composed as a cycle, per se, but were   7 Gogol opened his 1832 essay “A Few Words about Pushkin” with the bold assertion that “the mention of Pushkin’s name immediately brings to mind the thought of a Russian national poet” (PSS, 8:50). For a rereading of the essay as Gogol’s subversive bid to lay claim to the role of Russian national writer, see Edyta Bojanowska, “Equivocal Praise and National-Imperial Conundrums: Gogol”s ‘A Few Words About Pushkin,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 51, no. 2/3 (2009): 177–201.   8 On the complicated relationship between Pushkin and Gogol, see V. V. Gippius, “Literaturnoe obshchenie Gogolia s Pushkinym,” Uchenye zapiski Permskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 2 (1931), 61–126; Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 69–72, 150–53; and Valery Bryusov, “Burnt to Ashes,” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. Robert A. Maguire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 120–21. On the “Pushkin” vs. “Gogol” schools of Russian literature, see Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 114; and Maguire, introduction to Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 5.   9 “Avtorskaia ispoved’,” PSS, 8:439–40; see Vasily Gippius, “The Inspector General: Structure and Problems” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 218–19n4. For Pushkin’s response, as reported by the critic P. V. Annenkov and memoirist L. N. Pavlishchev, see Bryusov, “Burnt to Ashes,” 121 n.17. 10 See above for the excerpted text of Gogol’s letter from April 30, 1829 (PSS, 10:139).

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later grouped together by the author himself in the 1842 Collected Works. ­Pushkin’s tales of Petersburg (and particularly The Bronze Horseman, the prologue to which appeared in print in 1834),11 had showcased the city’s most prominent features: the white nights, the suppressed Neva, the elegant ­neoclassical architecture—in short, its “unnatural” character and the triumph of stone/culture over water/nature (and vice versa). By contrast, Gogol ignores these essential properties, even the water/stone opposition; in place of these distinct and rival elements, fog, mists, and snow cloud an indistinct topography. Once all the palaces, sculptures, and spires have been swept from the page, we’re left with a ground-level view: a single major artery, surrounded by a ­kaleidoscopic jumble of lesser streets; in short, what might be perceived by the city’s earth-bound human occupants, their eyes too preoccupied by the streets’ glittering minutiae to ascend heavenward. “Nevsky Prospect,” the introductory story in all collected editions of the Petersburg tales, was written in 1834 and published the following year in the collection Arabesques (Arabeski).12 In its pages, the vision of Petersburg on exhibit in The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades” is variously extended, reversed, literalized, and reduced to the absurd: the human beings who are figuratively crushed in the Pushkin tales are now literally fragmented on the streets of Petersburg; the formal duality of the poema (panegyric/tragedy) is reversed and debased (tragedy/farce); and the unnatural order discerned by Pushkin becomes actively demonic under Gogol. Even the relatively straightforward verbal acts of Pushkin’s works of 1833 (where spoken words variously create, defy, provoke, and fail) is ­characteristically inverted in “Nevsky Prospect”: in the tale that Gogol chose to 11 The full poem was published (though in edited form) only after the author’s death in 1837 but had circulated earlier among friends. For the poem’s publication (and prepublication) history, see N. V. Izmailov, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’ A. S. Pushkina: Istoriia zamysla i sozdaniia, publikatsii i izucheniia,” in A. S. Pushkin, Mednyi vsadnik (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), 221; 227–42. It is possible that Gogol would have been familiar with Pushkin’s poem prior to its 1837 publication, either in manuscript form or through conversation with the poet (the two did discuss various issues with the censors), but his knowledge of Pushkin’s literary ­Petersburg may have been limited to the poem’s prologue and “The Queen of Spades” at this early stage. The commonalities and distinctions between the two authors’ Petersburg works may also reflect general socio-cultural and literary trends, in addition to direct influence; though the Petersburg Text is by nature intertextual, unequivocal influence is naturally more difficult to demonstrate at this foundational level than later on in the tradition. 12 For composition and publication history, see the commentary to the Petersburg tales in PSS, 3:636–37.

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introduce his vision of Petersburg, the capital’s central prospect is figured as an all-consuming mouth of hell. The city once founded by the creative Word has been transformed into a symbol of monstrous orality: a mouth that no longer expresses, but devours. As we have seen, the written (official, European) and the oral (­ underground, traditional) constitute two competing tendencies in post-Petrine Russian culture; the Petersburg Text itself weaves strands of the “high” literary tradition (ode, elegy, tragedy) and threads from the “low” oral culture (legend, prophesy, folklore) into a richly textured verbal fabric. Lotman claimed that it was Gogol, together with Dostoevsky, who “canonized” the oral literature of the city, promoting it to the level of high literature (vysokaia slovesnost’).13 In fact, Pushkin had drawn on the city’s lore (such as Peter’s legendary verbal creation of Petersburg) as the basis of his Petersburg tales, whose plots likewise revolved around creative oral acts (such as Evgenii’s curse or the Countess’s anecdote). The focus on orality and verbal animation, then, was already central to ­Petersburg’s literary inheritance; the Gogolian city is a continuation and ­exaggeration of the Pushkinian one. But if both authors bring together the written and spoken records, they do not necessarily synthesize them in an equivalent manner: the monstrous, unbridled orality on display in Gogol’s Petersburg (the narrator’s dizzying skaz style; the transformation of city center into hellmouth) significantly problematizes the relationship between textuality and orality. It would appear that Gogol doesn’t so much dissolve the boundaries between the written and oral as bring them into competition with one another: his demonic vision of Petersburg demonstrates the limits of narrative fiction (which in “Nevsky Prospect” is constantly running up against oral obstacles), as well as the creative—and destructive—potential of overcharged orality.

“The dark maw”: Gogol and the Mouth of Hell That the demonic constitutes a major feature of Gogol’s poetics is by now axiomatic in the critical scholarship.14 Gogol’s early Ukrainian tales literally swarm with 13 Iu. M. Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga,” 15–16. See Buckler (Mapping St. Petersburg, 126–29) for a revision of this “canonical” view of the role of the role of oral legend in the city’s literary tradition. 14 For an excellent discussion of the demonic in Gogol’s early fiction, see Julian W. Connolly, “Gogol’s Early Demons: From Dikanka to Mirgorod,” in The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with

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demons: impish figures who dance and fly, cheat at cards, and turn into pigs. With the young writer’s move to St Petersburg, however, these mischievous demons all but disappear from view. But while Gogol’s Petersburg is still informed by what Julian Graffy calls a “concern with the demonic,” the frolicsome folk devils of the early tales have melted from sight, leaving behind only traces: set phrases invoking the unclean one (“devil take it!”), mystifying events, and an ominous, “demonic” atmosphere (though one virtually bereft of visible demons, beyond those crosslegged foreigners who tempt the heroes of “The Overcoat,” “The Portrait,” and “Nevsky Prospect”). One notable exception, of course, is the “devil himself” [sam demon] who lights the streetlamps on Nevsky, bathing everything in an unreal light. Who is this lone devil, and how did he survive the long journey from Dikanka?15 While it might be easy to spot the devils, witches, and ghouls of the early Ukrainian stories, with their pig snouts and broomsticks, it’s not quite so easy to define the Gogolian demonic; in populating his tales—both early and late—the author draws freely from traditional Christian theology, Romantic literary sources, the medieval tradition, and the mischievous demons of folklore.16 Regardless of the genealogy of his fiends, however, it is clear that Gogol’s postUkrainian demons turn serious, losing their conventional claws and tails, and slipping from sight; in short, they pass “from a fantasy of folk rhetoric to a fantasy charged with deep moral significance.”17 Connolly traces the evolution of Gogol’s vision of the demonic from the Dikanka cycle through the Petersburg Tales: generally speaking, whereas characters in the early fiction are tormented by external figures, the Petersburg protagonists are harassed by demons emanating

the Devil in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Julian W. Connolly (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 43–80; see also V. V. Gippius, “The Demonic and the Farcical,” in Gogol, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 28–39; Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and Orthodox Tradition,” and Faith Wigzell, “The Russian Folk Devil and His Literary Reflections,” both in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 42–46 and 73–75. 15 For more on manifestations of the demonic in Gogol’s Petersburg, see Graffy, “Devil Is in the Detail,” 243. 16 Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell,” 31–58; Wigzell, “Russian Folk Devil,” 59–86. For a summary of the various sources of literary demonism in nineteenth-century Russia, see W. J. Leatherbarrow, introduction to A Devil’s Vaudeville: The Demonic in Dostoevsky’s Major Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 1–26. 17 James M. Holquist, “The Devil in Mufti: The Märchenwelt in Gogol’s Early Stories,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 82, no. 5 (1967): 535.

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from the characters’ own inner world.18 Scholars generally agree that the demons of Gogol’s Petersburg cycle have moved underground: they lurk within a ­character’s sinful psyche, hide under a particularly comely cloak, or wait just beneath the surface of the story, rather than scamper around aboveground. But where, exactly, do these demons take shelter, once they’re removed from their sunny Ukrainian habitat? If Gogol’s Petersburg provides a “new map of hell,” in the words of James Holquist, where is the crevice from which these infernal figures slink at twilight?19 In Western Christian iconography of the Middle Ages, the entrance to hell was conventionally depicted as an enormous, cavernous mouth. Sinners were rounded up by demons—bound and dragged, prodded with pitchforks, pushed in wheelbarrows—to be cast into the gaping maw, swallowed up and devoured by the flames of damnation. The image was omnipresent in the medieval world, with ecclesiastical art of all forms—church engravings, altarpieces, stained glass, paintings, illuminations, tapestries, and manuscript illumination—depicting the beastly jaws poised to devour sinful souls.20 The hellmouth was a regular prop on the medieval stage as well, with visual and auditory special effects designed to intensify the dramatic impact of the image: hinged jaws that opened to swallow up unredeemed sinners at plays’ end, mouths that belched forth smoke, fire, or even a sulfurous stench, to the accompaniment of rumbling drums and demonic screams.21 In both visual art and mystery plays, the hellmouth featured in particular scenes: it gaped menacingly at the margins of Last Judgment tableaux, awaiting those souls unworthy of ascending into heaven; its giant lips fastened around sinners in visions of the apocalypse; and in scenes depicting the Harrowing of Hell, Christ pulled redeemed souls from its unlocked jaws. In her fascinating historical introduction to the seventeenth-­century Ukrainian play About the 18 Connolly, “Gogol’s Early Demons,” in Intimate Stranger, 43–80; Connolly, “Eluding Definition: The Devil in St. Petersburg,” in ibid., 81–110. 19 Holquist, “Devil in Mufti,” 360. 20 Pamela Sheingorn, “‘Who can open the doors of his face?’ The Iconography of Hell Mouth,” in The Iconography of Hell, ed. Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1992), 1–19. 21 Gary D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth-Century Britain to the Fifteenth Century (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), 165–78; Sheingorn, “‘Who can open the doors,’” 8–11; see also Philip Butterworth, “Hellfire: Flame as a Special Effect,” Richard Rastall, “The Sounds of Hell,” Thomas H. Seiler, “Filth and Stench as Aspects of the Iconography of Hell,” and Cecile Williamson Cary, “‘It circumscribes us here’: Hell on the Renaissance Stage,” all in Iconography of Hell.

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Fig. 1  Detail from Last Judgment panel. Hell Mouth or Jaws of Hell, Bourges Cathedral, c. twelfth century. Stained glass. Source: Wikipedia. Harrowing of Hell, Irena Makaryk speculates that Eastern European dramatists would have used similar mechanisms in their own religious dramas.22 Of course, the catalogue of Gogol’s influences should not be limited to the Russian or Orthodox contexts—as Adam Weiner notes in reference to Dead 22 Irena R. Makaryk, About the Harrowing of Hell: A Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Play in Its European Context (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989), 46–47.

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Souls, the author’s image of hell is a dark synthesis of Christian and pagan imagery, wrung from folklore, Christian and folk art, Orthodox iconography, his mother’s tales of the last judgment, and so on.23 Gogol was interested in and knowledgeable about Western art traditions, with a particular affinity for visual arts and the Middle Ages (in 1834, the same year that he was composing “Nevsky Prospect,” he managed to secure an adjunct professorship in medieval history at St. Petersburg University; one of his lectures, “On the Middle Ages,” is included in Arabesques alongside his Petersburg tale; a second article in the collection, “Sculpture, Painting, and Music,” characterizes painting as the ­quintessence of the Middle Ages); undoubtedly, his obsession with Western art is encoded in the story’s references to Italian painters. It should also be noted that Christian depictions of hell would continue to tug at Gogol’s imagination long after the publication of “Nevsky Prospect.” In 1843, the French art ­historian Adolphe Napoleon Didron released an influential two-volume history titled Christian Iconography: The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages, which included a substantial section on the iconography of demons, the Last ­Judgment, and various traditional depictions of the hellmouth. The book enjoyed enormous popularity among Russian artists at the time—Gogol himself studied it carefully and was so entranced that he even copied out ­(perevodil na kal’ku) certain images for his friend, the artist A. Ivanov, including one of St. Michael weighing souls on Judgment Day.24 The exact origins and evolution of the hellmouth figure are disputed;25 regardless of its provenance, however, the hellmouth provided the Middle Ages 23 Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 87. 24 See Adolphe Napoléon Didron, Christian Iconography: Or, The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Stokes (London: G. Bell, 1886). For more on Gogol’s copies of the Didron images, see I. A. Vinogradov and A. A. Ivanov, Aleksandr Ivanov v pis’makh, ­dokumentakh, vospominaniiakh (Moscow: XXI vek—Soglasie, 2001), 670–708; and Michal Oklot, Phantasms of Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 97–98. 25 Gary Schmidt argues that the hellmouth has diverse scriptural bases—including Isaiah, Numbers, Jonah, Job, Psalms, and Revelation—but that it also grew out of the classical tradition and Anglo-Saxon mythology (Iconography of the Mouth of Hell, 32–60). According to Schmidt, the visual image developed during the tenth-century monastic reform in England, then spread rapidly across Europe; it became popular during the evangelistic fervor of this reform period, as it provided “dramatic and concrete theological shorthand” for a complex doctrinal concept (19–31, here 30). Scholars have proposed additional explanations for the figure’s popularity: Ernst Guldan ties it to millennial fears, arguing that its proliferation in

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with a powerful and instantly recognizable image. But what, exactly, did it suggest to its terrified beholders? According to the medievalist David Williams, the mouth represents “one of the principal thresholds of the body and thus of the self, a border between the inside and the outside, a portal giving access to the recesses of the living organism or, in the other direction, to the phenomenal, physical world.”26 As a crucial site of contact between self and other—the breach in the integral body into which foreign bodies enter, and from which words escape—the very permeability of the oral imperils the boundaries of identity, spelling out the threat of physical disintegration. The two primary functions of the mouth—ingestion and expression—were conventionally at odds: one fed the belly, while the other conveyed the spirit. These two discrete functions were not intended to overlap, but the monstrous mouth of hell—an artifact of the sacred realm that consumes man’s flesh while providing passage to the other world—blurs these boundaries. In David Williams’s words, “The hell-mouth in its most general sense negates the division between humans and the spirits by presenting humans as physically consumed by the demon and thus becoming part of him.”27 In traditional Christian thought, the expressive function (God’s world-­ creating Logos; His pneuma, or Holy Spirit, which breathed life into man) was strongly associated with the divine, while the devouring mouth (gluttony, sex, destruction) was associated with venality. Patricia Dignan notes that the ­hellmouth image flourished in Western Europe during a period of increased focus on the Eucharist; her observation reverses the standard Christian ­understanding of speech/good vs. consumption/bad and suggests a perception of the tongue as locus of both virtue (a pathway for the Eucharist) and of vice (site of sinful speech).28 Indeed, the image reached the height of its popularity tenth-century Christianity suggests a connection to intensified awareness of the Last Judgment; Joyce Galpern suggests that the image of devouring animal jaws was tied to subconscious anxieties in the hostile natural environment of northern Europe (in Schmidt, Iconography of the Mouth of Hell, 17). These historical and scriptural notes are unrelated to Gogol’s interest in the hellmouth figure; I include them solely for the interest of readers. 26 David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 141. 27 Ibid., 144. 28 Patricia Grace Dignan, “Hellmouth and Villains: The Role of the Uncontrolled Mouth in Four Middle English Mystery Cycles” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1994), 1–3, cited by Sandy Bardsley, “Sin, Speech, and Scolding in Late Medieval England,” in Fama: The

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in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an era of increased concern with speech and its instruments (mouth, tongue).29 For historian Sandy Bardsley, the proliferation of the hellmouth figure in the late Middle Ages was tied to that era’s highly developed discourse on dangerous speech and “sins of the tongue,” including blasphemy, boasting, rumor, gossip, lying, and flattery.30 The waiting jaws offered Christians a horrifying reminder that, if speech could be a mode of sin, the mouth might provide access to eternal damnation. In Bardsley’s words, “By the late Middle Ages, everyone understood the metaphor: the mouth could be a site of evil, an entrance to hell, just as speech could be a form of sin.”31 The Eastern ecclesiastical artistic tradition swallowed the well-established imagery of the hellmouth whole, and by the fifteenth century it had become ­standard feature of the Orthodox iconography of hell—most famously in icons depicting the Last Judgment, but also in the Harrowing of Hell and the Ladder of Divine Ascent. The Last Judgment (known as the “Terrible Judgment” [Strashnyi sud] in ancient Rus’) is a traditional subject in Eastern Slavic sacral art; as Gavriel Shapiro notes, the image provided a graphic warning to every prospective sinner on his way out of church: “In the Orthodox tradition, ­frescoes or icons vividly depicting the Last Judgment are placed opposite the altar and iconostasis to symbolize the frightening alternative to living a godly life.”32 The idea of the Last Judgment, of course, had held a lifelong fascination for Gogol. In an 1833 letter to his mother, he recalled her vivid depiction of ­Judgment Day as the most powerful religious experience of his childhood: “But one time—I remember that instance vividly, as if it were now. I asked you to tell me about the last judgment; and so well, so comprehensively, so touchingly did you

29 30 31 32

Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 148. Bardsley, “Sin, Speech, and Scolding,” 147. Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England ­(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 27. Ibid., 26. Gavriel Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 234n7. Himka confirms that in churches of the Carpathian region, “it was customary to have a depiction of the Last Judgment on the northern wall (on the left-hand side as one entered the church)” ( John-Paul Himka, “‘Social’ Elements in Ukrainian Icons of the Last Judgment [Through the Eighteenth Century],” in Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine, ed. John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006], 235).

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tell me, a child, about the blessings which await people for a virtuous life—and so strikingly, so terrifyingly did you describe the eternal torments of the sinful— that this shook and awakened all sensitivity within me. That sparked and subsequently produced the most elevated thoughts in me.”33 Her thrilling portrait of the sinners’ eternal torment had awakened and shaped the young boy’s spiritual consciousness. The power of this subject and its ability to shock, frighten, and rouse apparently appealed to the young Gogol; as Konstantin Mochulsky observes, faith found him through terror, rather than love. It is striking that this letter (dated October 2, 1833) roughly coincides with the early composition process of “Nevsky Prospect”; ­additionally, the opening (October 3) entry of “Notes of a Madman”—which was also composed alongside “Nevsky” and included in Arabesques—­rhetorically gestures toward the Last Judgment: “What a creature! For him to hand out a month’s pay ahead of time—Good Lord, the Last Judgment would come first!”34 Clearly, the ­Judgment Day occupied the young author’s thoughts at this time. An enigmatic list in the author’s later notebooks (1842–50) contains the entry “Drawings of the Last Judgment [risunki strashnogo suda]” wedged among more mundane items like “money for the carpenter,” “sherry,” “art school,” and “trousers.” The unexpected entry testifies to his intensifying religiosity—and the enduring significance of Last Judgment imagery—into his later years.35 In his recent study of Last Judgment icons of medieval and early modern Carpathian churches, historian John-Paul Himka notes the “numerous discrete, although thematically connected, elements or motifs” that make Last Judgment iconography the most complex of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine traditions.36 Conventional elements include the hand of God weighing souls at the center, with an enthroned Christ above and the entrance to hell—a wide-open mouth, with or without teeth—gaping in the bottom right-hand corner of the icon, from the perspective of the viewer.37 In early (pre-sixteenth-century) icons, a river of fire winds its way through the artistic space separating the feet of Christ from the 33 PSS, 10:282. Translation from N. V. Gogol, Letters of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Carl R. Proffer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 45–46. 34 PSS, 3:193. 35 PSS, 9:573. 36 Himka, “‘Social’ Elements in Ukrainian Icons,” 235. 37 According to icongraphic convention, the viewer’s right is considered the left side of the icon. This inversion of perspective is considered in greater detail later in the chapter.

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inferno below.38 For medievalist David Goldfrank, the single most important feature of Last Judgment i­conography is this river of fire, which, according to scriptural sources, ran from God’s throne down to a “lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were.”39 In the sixteenth century, for unknown reasons, the river began to be replaced by a ladder or, most commonly, a serpent. Himka argues that the textual origin of the serpent is the “subtil” beast of Genesis 3, which inducted humankind into sin.40 This snake, whose body twisted from the holy figures at the center of the icon down to the awaiting flames and fangs in the bottom corner, provided a pathway for aerial “tollbooths” (mytarstva), stations along the path to God, at which demons would accuse the soul of sin and attempt to drag it off to hell. The mytarstva were represented as rings around the serpent’s body, each labeled with a p­ articular sin; the snake was generally ringed by twenty of these testing stations, with sins of increasing severity ranging from lying (least severe, closest to the center of the icon) to pride (most severe, closest to hell).41 These tollbooths offer a f­ascinating glimpse into the hierarchy of sin in early Orthodoxy and attest that the notion of the mouth as a locus of evil extended into the Slavic world and applied far beyond the actual mouth of hell: Boris Knorre’s detailed examination of one exemplary seventeenth-century Last Judgment icon shows that fully eight of the twenty tollbooths tested for oral sins (lying, denunciation, idle chatter, blasphemy, gluttony, drunkenness, slander, foul language), each seeking to monitor either what comes out of the mouth or what is put into it. Gogol was undoubtedly familiar with the figure of the hellmouth (and the fiery river that feeds it), both through its representation on the back wall of every 38 Each of these elements was inherited and elaborated from the Byzantine tradition; see JohnPaul Himka, Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 25–88, for a more detailed account of the origins of Last Judgment iconography of the Eastern Slavic region. According to Goldfrank, the standard elements had developed “by the time of the conversion of Rus’, with basic components taken from Scripture and Aprocrypha (sic.)” (David M. Goldfrank, “Who Put the Snake on the Icon and the Tollbooths on the Snake? A Problem of Last Judgment Iconography,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19, nos. 1–4 [1995]: 181). 39 NRSV Daniel 7:10; Revelation 20:10. See Goldfrank, “Who Put the Snake,” 183. 40 Himka, Last Judgment Iconography, 47; see also Goldfrank, “Who Put the Snake,” 180–99, for other possible sources. 41 See Himka, Last Judgment Iconography, 47–53; and Boris K. Knorre, “Icon of the Last Judgment: A Detailed Analysis” (Museum of Russian Icons Center for Icon Studies, 2013). http://museumofrussianicons.org/research/index.php/publications/occasional-papers/ knorre-b-icon-of-the-last-judgment/.

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Fig. 2  The Last Judgment, icon, first half of the seventeenth century. Egg tempera on wood. Historical Museum in Sanok, Poland. Source: Wikipedia Commons. Orthodox church, and through popular folk-art traditions like lubok and vertep, which similarly featured representations of hell as a set of beastly jaws. Lubki were popular prints, frequently uniting image and text, which were enormously fashionable between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. They ­ ­illustrated a range of narratives, from the high to the low: biblical and folk themes, historical events and political satire, literary and even ribald scenes were all

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r­ epresented. The hellmouth was a common motif in lubok, popping up in earlynineteenth-­century illustrations like “The Timely Repentance” (a p­ enitent sinner prays on his knees as demons spill out of an open mouth in the opposite corner, sobbing as their prey slips beyond their grasp) and “The Drunkard in the Tavern (a didactic print in which an inebriate, having sold his soul to the devil, gets dragged into the waiting jaws of hell).42 Likewise vertep, a portable, two-story puppet theater which was popular in Ukraine through the nineteenth century, likely employed hellmouth trapdoors in performances. The tradition was rooted in the Western European mystery play, and like their ­medieval ­predecessors, which staged biblical scenes in an entertaining or even bawdy style, vertep ­performances united sacred and profane, divine mystery with low comedy. ­Elizabeth Warner notes that in several plays “Herod’s corpse is dragged off to Hell by the Devil through a t­rapdoor”; other scholars, drawing on the legacy of ­medieval religious drama, more explicitly postulate the presence of a hellmouth on the vertep stage.43 Taken together, evidence from the religious and folk art traditions indicates that the ­hellmouth was a pervasive visual feature of Gogol’s age. Beyond these artistic representations, it was also a common motif in poetry, popping up in references to the “insatiable,” gaping jaws of hell in Skovoroda’s Garden of Divine Songs, or to “Eternity’s jaws” from Derzhavin’s final poem.44 Critics have also discerned the Last Judgment theme in literary works ­spanning Gogol’s own career, from “A Terrible Vengeance” (1832) through “The Overcoat,” The Inspector General, and Dead Souls, all published in 1842.45 Beyond 42 For more on lubok, see Alla Sytova, The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures, 17th to 19th Century (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1984); for examples of lubok ­hellmouths, see figs. 13, 47, 61, 69, 79, 81, 108, 109. For Gogol and lubok, see Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 58–106. 43 Elizabeth A. Warner, The Russian Folk Theatre (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), 94; Makaryk, About the Harrowing of Hell, 45–49; James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 70. 44 In Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 180n117; see also Harold B. Segel, The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia: An Anthology of Russian Literary Materials of the Age of Classicism and the Enlightenment from the Reign of Peter the Great, 1689–1725, to the Reign of Alexander I, 1801–1825, 2 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1967), 2:317; As Shapiro notes, the figure could be found in popular literary genres, both Western and Eastern (meditations, etc.), and in Ukrainian and Russian meditative poetry (Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 175–78). 45 On the general theme of judgment, see Andrei Bely, Gogol’s Artistry, ed. Christopher Colbath (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 230. For specific examples, see Stephen Moeller-Sally, who perceives an explicit allusion to the Last Judgment in the second “humane passage” of “The Overcoat” (Gogol’s Afterlife, 100–101); several critics, including

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

these pervasive subtextual suggestions of the Judgment Day, as the scholar E. S. Smirnova has pointed out, the hellmouth itself makes an explicit appearance in Dead Souls. Behind the verdant, overgrown thickets of P ­ liushkin’s garden, one can just make out a darkened recess, like an open pair of jaws: “In places the green thickets, lit by the sun, parted and revealed an unlit gap between them, yawning like a dark maw [temnaia past’].”46 Within its dark depths, the outstretched leafpaws (lapy-listy) of a young maple tree claw their way out, illuminated by a stray sunbeam and burning in the dense darkness. To Smirnova, the dark orifice hidden behind the bright verdure is unquestionably linked to the jaws of hell gaping in the corner of every luminous icon of the Last Judgment, a reminder of the ­“retribution awaiting those who, like Pliushkin, have allowed their souls to perish.”47 This quick glimpse of hell is hardly surprising, given that Dead Souls was modeled on Dante’s Inferno, a tour of hell that c­ ulminates in a vision of Satan devouring famous sinners in his each of his three mouths.48

“A mouth the size of the arch of the General Staff Building”: The Nevsky Hellmouth This chapter argues that Gogol first engaged with the literary image of the ­hellmouth a few years earlier than he had in Dead Souls, however, in the 1835 Petersburg tale “Nevsky Prospect.” The tale consists of two linked anecdotes that originate at dusk on Petersburg’s main artery: the idealistic artist Piskarev follows a dark beauty, only to realize that she is a prostitute; the discovery drives Per-Arne Bodin, discern a parodic Last Judgment in the mute scene of The Government Inspector (“The Silent Scene in Nikolaj Gogol’s The Inspector General,” ­Scando-Slavica 33 [1987]: 5–16); and Shapiro sees a sort of bureaucratic Judgment Day in Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 180–81). 46 PSS, 6:113: “Местами расходились зеленые чащи, озаренные солнцем, и показывали неосвещенное между них углубление, зиявшее, как темная пасть [. . .] молодая ветвь клена, протянувшая сбоку свои зеленые лапы-листы, под один из которых забравшись, бог весть каким образом, солнце превращало его вдруг в прозрачный и огненный, чудно сиявший в этой густой темноте.” 47 Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 180; see E. A. Smirnova, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi” (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 67–68. 48 Dante scholar and translator Tom Simone notes that in Canto 34 of The Inferno, the ­triple-faced Satan gnaws on the archtraitors Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. While this is not the mouth of hell proper, the image does introduce the visual and metaphorical aspects of the jaws of hell (Tom Simone, e-mail message to author, October 30, 2012).

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him to madness, drugs, and death. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pirogov follows a cute blonde who turns out to be the faithful wife of a German tinsmith. His own pursuit of an unattainable woman does not end in tragedy, however—in the end, he simply soothes his injured pride with two puff pastries and a few pages of The Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela) then returns unharmed to Nevsky. In the folk tradition, unclean forces inhabit the spaces that serve as a threshold between defined areas, times, or states. Such liminal spaces and moments—a crossroads, a doorway, the stroke of midnight, or the turn of a new year— provide a conduit between this world and that (tot mir), through which the devil might emerge to tempt, trouble, or entrap. In the folk imagination, devils didn’t settle in a specific place in this world; they inhabited the nether regions familiar from icons of the Last Judgment, passing from one world into the other through holes in the earth: fissures, caves, ravines, and abysses. (The allure of gaping holes also explained the devil’s penchant for creeping into open mouths, making the acts of sneezing or yawning particularly fraught.) Aside from cavernous openings, folk belief associated devils with water—specifically swamps and other bodies of standing water—which was believed to form a boundary with the other world.49 As William Leatherbarrow points out, the semiotics of folk evil are preserved more or less intact within Gogol’s fictional universe, with various threshold spaces—watery reflections, twilight entrances, staircases, Christmas Eve, pails of slops—virtually saturating the pages of his work. Sven Spieker notes that liminal spaces, the domain of the demonic, appear especially frequently in the collection containing “Nevsky Prospect”: “The threshold motif has a particularly high profile in the collection Arabesques where the river Dnieper and its inhabitants (the Cossacks), the Middle Ages, and the art of painting are all assigned a medial position in between the neighboring spheres.”50 49 For more on features of the folk demonic, see Wigzell, “Russian Folk Devil,” 59–72; and Leatherbarrow, Devil’s Vaudeville, 2–13. 50 Sven Spieker, “The Centrality of the Middle: On the Semantics of the Threshold in Gogol”s ‘Arabeski,’” Slavonic and East European Review 73, no. 3 (1995): 469. There have been several excellent studies of the semiotics of Gogolian space. In his classic analysis of literary space in Gogol’s fiction, Lotman examines Gogol’s poetics within the context of the Russian cultural affinity for binary oppositions (see Iu. M. Lotman, “Problema khudozhestvennogo prostranstva v proze Gogolia,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, no. 11 [Tartu, 1968], 5–50). Spieker follows Lotman in postulating a “spatial metalanguage,” in which spatial relations

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

Indeed, “Nevsky” teems with such markers of liminality, as well as the ­accompanying demons; of course, any story set in Petersburg—an eerily half-lit city spread out on a swamp and traversed by a system of filthy canals—might be expected to crawl with the unclean.51 Until noon, we learn, the titular street serves only as a conduit [sluzhit tol’ko sredstvom], a channel to some other place that gradually fills up with people.52 The tale truly begins at twilight, however— that most liminal of times, when shadows stretch out and footsteps grow uneven—when the street has become a goal [tsel’] for anyone eager to “peak under ladies’ hats.” The tale even comments on social liminality: Piskarev, we learn, is an artist—a creature about as welcome in practical Petersburg as an apparition in reality—and his marginal status in this capital of commerce and bureaucracy makes him particularly susceptible to demonic influences. As dusk falls, ladders and staircases (both lestnitsy), which navigate the liminal zone between high and low, lead the devil to his oil lamps, and Piskarev to his ­beauty’s brothel. Just before they take off after their respective quarries, Pirogov warns Piskarev to “get a move on, you fool, or you’ll miss her” (stupai, prostofilia, prozevaesh’! [16]). Colloquially, prozevat’ means “to miss an opportunity,” but the literal association with yawning evokes the dreaded open mouth into which demons are apt to crawl; could this be the entry point for Piskarev’s demonic possession? translate into “religious, social, political and ethical relations” (“Centrality of the Middle,” 449); where Lotman focused on the dominant role of borders, however, Spieker highlights liminal areas, where two binary spheres merge and intermingle (453). 51 As the lead-in to Gogol’s story cycle about Petersburg, and the only one named after a prominent feature of the capital, the story seems to set itself the task of surveying and c­ ataloguing Peter’s city. As Graffy writes, the position of the story (first in all editions of the Petersburg tales) and its title “announce it as setting an agenda for Gogol’s examination of the city, in which the street plays as dominant a role as it does in the city itself ” (“Devil Is in the Detail,” 247). Richard Peace, too, notes the story’s kernel position within the Petersburg cycle, as well as its “nuclear importance for Gogol’s other four tales of St Petersburg” (The Enigma of Gogol: An Examination of the Writings of N. V. Gogol and Their Place in the Russian Literary Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 96). 52 PSS, 3:11. Hereafter in this chapter, references to volume three of Gogol’s Polnoe sobranie, the volume which contains “Nevsky Prospect,” will generally be identified by page number only. Quotations from Gogol’s Petersburg tales have been adapted from those in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1999); and Diary of a Madman, the Government Inspector and Selected Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2005).

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Beyond these conventional (and well-analyzed) threshold zones, however, Gogol buries some more significant signifiers of liminality: the yawning chasms that open and close his tale. Gogol launches his tale with a famously elevated panegyric to Petersburg’s central street, his breathless raptures animating an exhibition of abundance—and inflating an oratorical bubble which he himself will burst in the story’s final lines. Even before the epilogue, however, when he will expose the deception in his initial portrayal of the street, the narrator laces his lofty rhetoric with enough qualifications and disavowals to belie his own account: “There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect, at least not in ­Petersburg.”53 Even more provocatively, he appears to weave this impression of fullness out of nothing: Nevsky, which purportedly “constitutes all,” is in fact characterized through an accumulation of the negative. The narrative commences with the word Net, and the opening five lines alone contain six repetitions of the negative particles net, ne, and ni; the motif even extends to the eponymous Prospect, whose name begins with an acoustic reminder of negation: Nevsky.54 Through this gradual accretion of absence, the narrator tears a gaping hole in the fabric of his opening paean; his narrative trick—creating an air of abundance while simultaneously hollowing it out—reveals Nevsky Propect to be a void, draped in fashion and foreign wares. From this narrative abyss, one must step up to reach the street, as Gogol takes pains to point out: “The moment you step up [vzoidesh’] onto Nevsky Prospect, it already smells of nothing but gaiety; once you’ve stepped up onto it [vzoshedshi na nego], you are sure to forget about any business you had.”55 Reinforcing this impression of a pit beneath the street, the narrative vantage point appears to lie below ground level, as though the narrator were peering up from the emptiness to the bustle above; the first objects of his attention are invariably at street level: shoes,

53 PSS, 3:9, my emphasis. 54 “Нет ничего лучше Невского проспекта, по крайней мере в Петербурге; для него он составляет всё. Чем не блестит эта улица—красавица нашей столицы! Я знаю, что ни один из бледных и чиновных ее жителей не променяет на все блага Невского проспекта. Не только кто имеет двадцать пять лет от роду, прекрасные усы и удивительно сшитый сюртук, но даже тот, у кого на подбородке выскакивают белые волоса и голова гладка, как серебряное блюдо, и тот в восторге от Невского проспекта. А дамы!—О, дамам еще больше приятен Невский проспект. Да и кому же он не приятен?” (ibid.; my emphases). 55 Ibid.

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

shadows, footprints—even the scratch left by a saber in the asphalt.56 And through this empty space, everyone seems to be flying: materialistic ­Petersburgers are flying (letiashchie) through the city in carriages, while a sleepy Ganymede from a Nevsky pastry shop has already flown around (letavshii) with chocolate; Piskarev’s beauty—who clearly flew down (sletelo) from heaven and is likely to fly off again (uletit)—had flown (uletavshaia) ahead of her pursuer into the distance, then soared (letela) up the stairs; Piskarev, in pursuit, had flown (letevshii) down the street, in time with the beating of his heart, then soared (vzletel) up the stairs after her; even the earth-bound Pirogov flies (letel) by story’s end. In the final pages, following the twin cautionary tales of Piskarev and Pirogov, the narrator returns one last time to warn his readers not to trust Nevsky, for “the devil himself [sam demon] lights the lamps, only to show ­everything in an unreal light” (46). His warning proceeds with a meditation on the absurdities of fate, which he opens with “a mouth the size of the arch of the General Staff Building” (rot velichinoiu v arku Glavnogo Shtaba) (45). This seemingly extraneous architectural aside refers to the long, curved smile of an edifice flanking Palace Square, whose triumphal arch joins the top of the square to Nevsky (via the top block of Bolshaia Morskaia Street).57 The grotesquely large mouth of the arch gapes over the entrance to the Prospect as the narrator finishes his increasingly overwrought admonition about the dangers of the Nevsky at night: It lies at all times, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all when night heaves itself upon it in a thick mass, throwing the white and paleyellow walls of buildings into relief, when the entire city is transformed into thunder and flashes, myriad carriages tumble from bridges, 56 “Как чисто подметены его тротуары и, боже, сколько ног оставило на нем следы свои! И неуклюжий грязный сапог отставного солдата, под тяжестью которого, кажется, трескается самый гранит, и миниатюрный, легкий как дым, башмачек молоденькой дамы, оборачивающей свою головку к блестящим окнам магазина, как подсолнечник к солнцу, и гремящая сабля исполненного надежд прапорщика, проводящая на нем резкую царапину, — всё вымещает на нем могущество силы или могущество слабости” (10). 57 Bolshaia Morskaia runs under the triumphal arch, connecting Palace Square to Nevsky Prospect.

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postilions cry out and jump up and down on their horses, and when the devil himself lights the lamps with the sole purpose of showing everything in an unreal light.58 These portentous final lines could have been written from within the maw ­overhanging Nevsky: we watch as darkness descends, setting off the bone-­ colored teeth of buildings; roars fill the city as flashes of fire illuminate carriages tumbling from bridges into the abyss below; horsemen cry out as the devil emerges to light his duplicitous lamps. This apocalyptic image anticipates the great dark maw glimpsed through the gaps in the greenery of Pliushkin’s estate: there is no explicit mouth named here, but the same thick blackness hides a fiery glow within, like the radiant leaf-paws straining out of the garden’s dark jaws.59 At dusk, with Nevsky’s oil lamps lit, Gogol’s Petersburg has been ­transformed into a sort of narrative icon of the Last Judgment, its main ­thoroughfare running like a river of fire from the ravenous mouth at its origin.

“Some demon chopped the world into bits”: The Function of the Nevsky Hellmouth On a figurative level, as we have seen, Gogol’s inaugural Petersburg tale opens in a narrative chasm and closes within the massive mouth at the head of Nevsky. And in between the daily opening and closing of these hidden jaws, the ­Prospect goes through regular cycles of filling up and emptying out: in the morning, the street stands empty (save for a few loiterers of the lowest classes); it gradually 58 “Он лжет во всякое время, этот Невский проспект, но более всего тогда, когда ночь сгущенною массою наляжет на него и отделит белые и палевые стены домов, когда весь город превратится в гром и блеск, мириады карет валятся с мостов, форейторы кричат и прыгают на лошадях и когда сам демон зажигает лампы для того только, чтобы показать все не в настоящем виде” (46). 59 The composition of “Nevsky Prospect” was bound up with the unfinished “A Streetlamp Was Dying” (Fonar’ umiral, 1832–33), a fragment that opens with imagery reminiscent of the closing scene of “Nevsky”: white houses stand out against a thick mass of darkness, while the wooden sidewalk disappears (propadaet, or “falls away”) (PSS, 3:329). Within this rather abysmal (oral?) landscape, an angelic woman in white is accompanied by a mysterious figure in black whose entire, terrifying profile consists of a nose. Clearly, “Nevsky”’s final scene, the details of which Gogol had begun working out as early as 1832—the dense blackness cut by white walls, the suggestion of a surrounding chasm, the demonic creature—were fundamental to the tale. For more on composition history, see the editor’s commentary, PSS, 3:645–48.

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

fills up (or, more literally, it “fills itself with faces”—“napolniaetsia litsami” [11])60 until, at noon, successive waves of humanity—tutors and their wards, ladies and gentlemen, titular and court councilors—pass along the length of the prospect. At four o’clock the street is vacant again, apart from a few ­eccentric (or unwary) stragglers, until dusk, when the devil’s light draws throngs of men of all classes to peek at illicit prints and the rouge-plastered cheeks of ladies. The street’s daily routine—its fixed sequence of filling and emptying, filling and emptying—completes the image of a devouring maw, a sort of urban digestive tract that draws in, chews up, and swallows its own inhabitants.

Tempting and Leading Astray Traditional artistic representations of the hellmouth feature black demons that hover around the entrance, ready to lure, trick, or otherwise drag unsuspecting sinners to their eternal damnation. If indeed the Nevsky is crowned by a ­hellmouth—a permeable threshold between the human and demonic realms poised to devour its sinful denizens—then these infernal accomplices must be discernible somewhere near the opening. Indeed, as we have observed, the devil himself emerges regularly to cast his deceptive light and draw sinners up the street toward the cavernous, consuming arch at its peak. The devil does not work alone, however: he is aided by a host of demonic agents, most obviously Piskarev’s dark beauty, “an exquisite creature who seemed to have flown down onto Nevsky ­Prospect directly from heaven, and would surely fly off again who knows where” (16). The naïve artist’s constant references to his object’s “divine features” (bozhestvennye cherty) and “heavenly eyes” (nebesnye glaza) belie her true ­provenance; in fact, her aspect betrays clear shades of the demonic: her pure white brow is threatened by unruly black curls; her bright cape flashes, then blackens, as she flies from streetlight to streetlight. The narrator, too, s­ emiotically strengthens this association with the devil, referring to her features (cherty), her hair (chernye), the floor of her house (chetvertyi), and even its rows of glowing windows (chetyre), all of which share an initial phoneme with the devil (chert).61 60 Litso has multiple meanings in Russian; while the literal meaning is “face,” it is often used to refer to a “person,” or “individual.” 61 Cf. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat: A Psychoanalytical Study (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982), 221.

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This demonic beauty enacts the devil’s primary function—to deceive and lead astray: she flies, and Piskarev begins to fly after her (“naznakomka letala po lestnitse” / “On vzletel na lestnitsu”); later on, he will try to verify that the ­prostitute is the same creature who so “bewitched” (okoldovala) and “carried him away” (unesla ego) on Nevsky Prospect. Ultimately, stripped of the artist’s projected fantasy, this Madonna is exposed as a petty demon, familiar from both Last Judgment iconography and Gogol’s Ukrainian tales: a dark creature who flies in from another world at dusk, cape flapping as she wings her way through the streets and up to her den, bewitching and leading off unsuspecting victims on the way. And Piskarev’s temptress is not the only demonic agent to lead a man to his doom; in Gogol’s Petersburg, the devil consistently uses beauty as bait to tempt men into the mouth of hell. The tale’s first and final lines both emphasize the dominion of beauty in this town, as the narrator’s bright hymn to Nevsky (“What brilliance does this street lack, this beauty of our capital!”) darkens into a warning about the beauties one might meet on the street (“however invitingly a beauty’s cloak may flutter in the distance, not for anything would I follow behind her to satisfy my curiosity”).62 In between these bracketing statements on beauty, women, art, and particularly Nevsky Prospect itself—“krasavitsa nashei stolitsy”—emerge in turn as the various “beauties” in the story guilty of leading men astray. If, as Julian Connolly notes, the narrator’s about-face reveals the “beauty” of Nevsky to be “as equivocal and disturbing as the ‘beauty’ Piskarev has followed home,” then isn’t it likely that all the other beauties populating Gogol’s tale (notably women and art), are equally treacherous?63 Indeed, the false lights on Nevsky prove as alluring as the blinding white face of Piskarev’s beloved; in fact, in the profoundly unnatural order of the northern capital, the sun is replaced by brightly lit shop windows, toward which women turn their faces like sunflowers to the sun. In a world where artifice of all sorts—artificial illumination, the vulgar prints in a shop window, an expensive-looking ­prostitute’s shawl, the rouge plastered on a woman’s cheek—seems to lie in wait for new victims, woman (“eta krasavitsa mira”) is identified as the most ­treacherous trap of all: “God forbid you should peek under ladies’ hats!”64 62 PSS, 3:9, 3:46. 63 Connolly, Intimate Stranger, 91. 64 PSS, 3:21, 3:46.

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

What is the effect of all this beauty on its beholders? As we have seen, the “exquisite creature” leads Piskarev astray: as soon as he takes off after her flashing cloak, he involuntarily quickens (uskorial) his pace; after she glances at him, his faculties fail and he is borne along the trail of her footsteps, unable to moderate his own pounding heart; finally, he “flies” up the stairs after her.65 Nevsky Prospect possesses a comparable power to take control of its walkers’ footfalls and lead them astray: as soon as its lamps are lit, men’s footsteps ­involuntarily speed up (uskoriaiutsia); and regardless of one’s purpose, the tricky street is sure to lead its passengers off course and distract them from “any business” they had.66 We might likewise safely assume, based on the narrator’s impassioned warning, that whatever lurks beneath ladies’ “hats” possesses an equivalent power to mislead.

Chewing Up In the medieval imagination, the hellmouth figure promised the threat of eternal decomposition, the painful and perpetual digestion of the damned within the belly of the beast. Gogol suggests this process of physical d­ isintegration in the street’s disorienting exhibition of body parts. Once a s­ ufficient number of victims have been lured into the Nevsky hellmouth, whether by streetlight or ­streetwalker, their bodies are chopped, mixed, and masticated until the street becomes a ­phantasmagoria of body parts and clothing, a hallucinatory tide of singular ­sidewhiskers, heliated sleeves, dainty feet, and bottleneck waists, all flowing “from the Police bridge to Anichkov and back.”67 People are “chewed” into their ­constituent parts to form what the rapturous narrator terms “an exhibition of man’s greatest works” (13); here, however, the proizvedeniia refer not to works of creative production but to the flood of fashion and physique. Whiskers, waists, and other dismembered features are then artistically reanimated and either added 65 “On nevol’no uskorial shag svoi” (my emphasis) (19); “Ne slysha, ne vidia, ne vnimaia, on nessia po legkim sledam prekrasnykh nozhek, staraias’ sam umerit’ bystrotu svoego shaga, letevshego pod takt serdtsa” (16). 66 “Shagi vsekh uskoriaiutsia i stanoviatsia voobshche ochen’ nerovny” (my emphasis) (9): “khotia by imel kakoe-nibud’ nuzhnoe, neobkhodimoe delo, no vzoshedshi na nego, verno, pozabudesh’ o vsiakom dele” (15). 67 O. G. Dilaktorskaia, “Khudozhestvennyi mir peterburgskikh povestei N. V. Gogolia,” in N. V. Gogol’, Peterburgskie povesti, ed. O. G. Dilaktorskaia (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995), 211.

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to the parade of parts or transformed by the narrator’s revitalizing vision into balloons, butterflies, or beetles—while their former possessors are abandoned, forgotten, and u­ ltimately dehumanized. (These transfigured objects might seem ­insignificant—even ­ridiculous—but make no mistake: this is the same authorial act of animation that brought the Bronze Horseman clattering to life and turned Evgenii to stone.) And Nevsky is not the only entity to inspire such physical chaos; a single backward glance from the soaring dark beauty is enough to turn Piskarev’s world topsy-turvy: “The sidewalk was moving beneath him, carriages pulled by galloping horses seemed motionless” (19). In the artist’s exhilarating vision, as in Nevsky’s grand pageant of appendages and apparel, the inanimate is animated while the living stands still. The architect of all this disarray is identified explicitly at the ball, when the bewildering assembly of tailcoats, shoulders, and chandeliers that Piskarev encounters makes him wonder whether “some demon had chopped the whole world into a multitude of pieces, then recombined those pieces at random.”68 If we didn’t already suspect that both Nevsky, which reduces its people to pulp, and the dark beauty, whose gaze breaks the laws of physics, were operating in the service of the devil, the ball scene reveals the connection between disorder and the demonic. Indeed, the very function of the demonic in Gogol’s ­Petersburg appears to be to reduce cosmos to chaos: to chew up God’s orderly creation and spew out the pieces. The resulting disarray is disguised with ­artifice and beauty: bright lights and a coating of rouge. The demonic residue of disorder is evident everywhere that beauty is produced; not only on luminous Nevsky but in the “sanctuary” of Piskarev’s Madonna, where “some sort of unpleasant disorder [besporiadok]” reigns (20). In short, it turns out that anything initially hailed for its beauty actually conceals the shadow of chaos.

Digesting Once the integral body has been gnawed into pieces, it is ready to be swallowed up and fully incorporated into the demonic. As David Williams writes, the 68 “emu kazalos’, chto kakoi-to demon iskroshil ves’ mir na mnozhestvo raznykh kuskov i vse eti kuski bez smysla, bez tolku smeshal vmeste” (24). See also Mikhail Vaiskopf [Weiskopf] on fragmentation (droblenie) as evidence of demonism in the Dikanka stories (Siuzhet Gogolia: Morfologiia, ideologiia, kontekst [Moscow: Radiks, 1993], 58–59).

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

medieval hellmouth ingests and digests, transforming individuals into victuals; the monstrous mouth assimilates what it digests, transforming its quarry into a part of itself for all time.69 If nighttime Nevsky is associated with artificial ­illumination, its daytime crowds are distinguished by their pestrota, or diversity of color;70 this brilliance finds reflection in the flying figure of Piskarev’s dark beauty, demonic agent of the street, whose bright, colorful cape (pestryi plashch) is “at once bathed in bright light as it approached the streetlight, and instantly covered in darkness as it moved away” (16). This midnight Madonna has, in effect, already been devoured and incorporated into the demonic semiotics of the street, and she carries its unnatural patina on her vibrant, flashing cape. As soon as Piskarev begins to follow this bright beacon he, too, begins to mimic the demonic street. As we have seen, his vision is minced into disorder and he begins to fly; later, when he flees the brothel, he runs “like a goat,” as though the residue of the demonic were already clinging to him. That night, his dreams—which would appear to offer him an idyllic escape from the corruption he has encountered on Nevsky—in fact retain the same traces of the street as the Madonna’s cape had: the demon’s bright lights reappear in the chandelier-lit ballroom, and the brightly colored Nevsky élite resurfaces in the kaleidoscopic crowd at the ball (“The extraordinary diversity [neobyknovennaia pestrota] of faces threw him into complete bewilderment” [23–24]). The bits and pieces that flash before him—shoulders, coats, lights, French and English words, hands, and ladies made of air—are all familiar from the narrator’s description of the street; even in dreams, the demonic light of Nevsky is inescapable. It is clear from Piskarev’s reverie—a heady mix of the lights, langues, and limbs he encountered on his fateful night visit to the perilous prospect—that this dreamer has already been metaphorically bitten and “infected” by the Nevsky hellmouth. Ultimately, he will follow the street in “coming to life” only at night: “as soon as dusk descends, [. . .] then Nevsky Prospect comes back to life [ozhivaet] and begins to stir” (14–15); as Piskarev’s 69 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 144. 70 “[Deti] nakonets vytesniaiutsia nezhnymi ikh roditeliami, idushchimi pod ruku s svoimi pestrymi, raznostvetnymi, slabonervnymi podrugami” (11); “Tysiachi sortov shliapok, plat’ev, platkov—pestrykh, legkikh, k kotorym inogda v techenie tselykh dvukh dnei sokhraniaetsia priviazannost’ ikh vladetel’nits, oslepiat khot’ kogo na Nevskom prospekte” (12). All emphases mine.

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infected dreams take over, he likewise “became animated [ozhivlialsia] only with the approach of night” (28). This tortured, upside-down existence proves impossible for the artist to maintain, and he soon takes his own life. And this infernal assimilation is not limited to the Piskarev storyline; the street’s incorporation of clerks and soldiers takes a different form, however. In opposition to the fragile Piskarev, who is consumed and destroyed when “infected,” those more robust members of the social order prove adept at adapting to their unnatural environment. Their ingestion into the hellmouth does not lead to breakdown; rather than being spiritually consumed by the street, these social climbers simply assimilate, becoming consumers par ­excellence. The officers of Petersburg society have, in effect, already been digested by the street; they are reduced to shiny epaulettes, indistinguishable among the rest of the objects—both living and not—that make up their middle-class milieu: “a few pale-faced daughters, as colorless as St. Petersburg, some of them past their prime, a tea table, a piano, dancing—all this tends to be inseparable from a bright epaulet gleaming in the light of a lamp between a well-mannered blonde and the black tail-coat of her brother or some old friend of the family” (34). Pirogov and others of his class exhibit the same tendencies toward indiscriminate consumption as the street: for them there is no ­distinction between the high art of Pushkin and the third-rate scribblings of Bulgarin and Grech, between Woe from Wit and Dmitrii Donskoi. After his humiliating beating, we learn, Pirogov “stopped into a pastry shop, ate two puff pastries, read something in The Northern Bee, and left in a not-so-wrathful state” (45); and when lowbrow literary journals and puff pastries provide equal comfort, reading has become, in effect, just another form of consumption.71 In fact, many of the paraders one meets on Nevsky show a tendency toward visual feasting, carving up the parts of passersby as neatly as the narrator: “there are a number of people who, upon meeting you, will unfailingly stare at your boots, and once you have passed, turn around to have a look at your coattails” (13). The narrator at first takes these voyeurs for cobblers, but it turns out they’re just regular folks who, like Pirogov, “spend their time strolling around or reading 71 Stephen Moeller-Sally notes a similar confluence of reading with other “material pleasures” like shaving or napping in Gogol’s writing from this time, and connects the phenomenon to the rise of commercial journalism (“0000; or, The Sign of the Subject in Gogol’s Petersburg,” in Russian Subjects, 343).

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newspapers in pastry shops—in a word, they are nearly all respectable people” (13);72 these all-consuming Petersburgers seem to share a taste for fashion, fiction, and food in equal measure—and often all at the same time.

Burning The interchangeability of consumables on Nevsky—the essential equivalence of the edible and the legible—is rooted in the overlapping semantic terrain populated by the prolific Slavic word root -pek-. According to Moeller-Sally, the analogy of printed and baked goods/material (pechatennoe/pechenoe) became a familiar and conventional means of commenting on commercial print culture and consumerism in the early nineteenth century.73 This book/ bread ­substitution pops up throughout Gogol, most notably in the ­incomplete Ukrainian tale “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”—which begins with the narrator’s apology that his housekeeper has used the end of his manuscript to bake a pie and ends in a reference to a nonexistent (presumably already cooked and consumed) next chapter—and in “The Nose,” in which the titular character, who begins the story baked in a roll, becomes equated with verbal authority.74 The kinship of printed word and pastry is evident in “Nevsky P ­ rospect,” in which the narrator’s verbally exuberant introduction to the street commences with the scent of fresh bread, and abruptly cuts off with an order to “Stop!” from Pirogov, the Pie-man; later, this living, breathing Pirog will bring an equally unforeseen—and rather 72 This connection between literature and libation is tightened elsewhere, as well: during that same hour on the Prospect, we encounter folks who have just finished up their important domestic duties, including “reading an advertisement and an important article in the ­newspaper on arrivals and departures, and, finally, drinking a cup of coffee or tea” (11). 73 For more on the contemporary association between reading and eating—equating the ­pleasures of commercial literature with the earthly comforts of a loaf of bread—see MoellerSally, “0000,” 338–44. 74 For more on Shponka, see Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 15; “The Nose” is discussed in the next chapter. Gogol makes the connection between commercial literature and food explicit in his anonymous “On Trends in Periodical Literature in 1834 and 1835,” noting that, as j­ ournalistic activity had slackened over the past two years (that is, at the very time that he was composing “Nevsky Prospect”), the need for “mental food” had become more noticeable: “imenno v eto vremia byla zametna vseobshchaia potrebnost’ umstvennoi pishchi, i znachitel’no vozroslo chislo chitaiushchikh” (PSS, 8:157).

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a­ nticlimactic—end to the galloping narrative when he pops two pastries into his mouth and forgets the whole humiliating incident he’s just inspired. In both instances, Pirogov—the c­ orporeal and complacent counterpart to Piskarev’s spiritual anguish—pronounces the end (and antithesis) of text. St. Petersburg has become a city in which “the baked” holds sway over “the printed”; and when a walking baked good can dictate the flow of narrative, the material has truly transcended the spiritual. We have seen how Pirogov and his fellow members of official society are assimilated into the unnatural, homogeneous ecosystem of Petersburg; but what happens to those souls who do not conform—those who, once consumed, cannot adapt into expert consumers? The fundamental job of the hellmouth, of course, is to convey sinful souls down to the ovens of hell, where they will burn eternally. Gogol encodes the infernal into his tale with the polysemous pek-, whose associations with burning extend to hell itself: peklo designates the inferno in both Ukrainian and, more colloquially, in Russian. That is, not only the processes of baking and writing but also the demonic—through the infernal peklo—are intertwined on Nevsky. In the early morning, as Nevsky stands empty, awaiting its influx of new victims, St. Petersburg is suffused with the smell of hot, just-baked (vypechennyi) bread (of course, the normally comforting scent turns slightly sinister when wafting up a desolate street that leads into a giant, devouring mouth). Fleshy (plotnye) shop owners still sleep as the aroma fills the street, their pale flesh supine and unguarded; this subtle conjunction of flesh and bread, almost sacrilegious in its Eucharistic implications, is made more explicit later on in the Petersburg tales, when Ivan Iakovlevich cuts open his morning roll to find something pale and fleshy (plotnoe) inside. The raw Piskarev is described as bespechnyi (carefree, but with a strong aural association with “not yet baked”), though he possesses in his soul “sparks [iskry] of feelings ready on the right occasion to burst into flame [plamia]” (18). After the beauty smiles at him, the spark ignites, as though some burning process were kindled by her demonic lips: “all his senses were aflame [goreli], and everything before him was enveloped in a sort of fog [. . .] His knees shook; his senses and thoughts were on fire [goreli]; a lightning flash of joy [molniia radosti], unbearably acute, pierced his heart!” (19). In the end, the daily movements of the street—the regular emptying out of people, accompanied by the smell of baking bread; the rapid consumption of

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its freshest passersby, ignited by the smile of an infernal agent—combine to suggest the question: could Nevsky represent one giant, infernal “bakery” of human souls, ready to render uncooked flesh into consumables? At that time, it likely would have been natural to associate the town baker—who worked all night over a fiery, open-mouthed oven, his face blackened by smoke and ash— with demonic forces: certainly, the Russian folk tradition is stuffed with women who bake babies (Kolobok) or roast children (Baba Yaga and Ivanushka), while “imperfect” infants or children were ritually wrapped in dough and “baked” in a ceremony called perepekanie (rebaking); within this cultural context, demonic associations with the baker don’t seem implausible.75 And if Nevsky is incinerating its citizens, why are some poor souls consumed, while others live on to consume more pastry? After all, both Piskarev and Pirogov are misled by the demon’s light that night on Nevsky Prospect, but one is destroyed, while the other appears invincible. The “uncooked” Piskarev is an artist, a marginal figure as alien to Petersburg’s ­commercial and bureaucratic ranks as the daybreak drifters who melt away by noon. Perhaps his obliteration represents the street’s eagerness to smooth out any ­irregularities in the tidy social order it supports. Pirogov, in contrast, is a recently promoted officer: a successful and wholly assimilated member of the hierarchy. The very name “Pirogov” (son of a meat pie) marks him as someone who has already been “baked” (and is consequently invulnerable to the flames of the ­hellmouth); meanwhile, the interchangeable consumables he ingests and extols—the Northern Bee, the puff pastries, the transposable copies of Bulgarin, Pushkin, and Grech—indicate his kinship with a street that indiscriminately mixes boots, beetles, body parts, and beaver collars. Nevsky consumes them all; some it incorporates, and others it simply expels as waste.

“A strange phenomenon”: The Role of the Artist in Petersburg The leveling of consumable objects on Nevsky raises questions about art and the role of the artist in Russia’s cultural capital. In a world where Pushkin is 75 See Jack V. Haney, An Introduction to the Russian Folktale (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 1:56–57; and Snejana Tempest, “Stovelore in Russian Folklife,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Stetson Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 9.

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equivalent to Bulgarin, a tabloid as expendable as a tart, what is the status of Gogol’s narrative? Is it elevated by comparison to the cheap commercial press, or is it debased, reduced to the level of a pirozhok? The treatment of this theme in “Nevsky Prospect” betrays a deep ambivalence toward the role of art and the artist in Petersburg. The archetypal artistic drive—the struggle to draw order (and even beauty) out of disorder—would appear to be at odds with the demonic forces at work on Nevsky that exploit beauty and jumble order into chaos. In this sense, the narrator’s fantastical, cautionary portrait of the street might be read as an attack on the demonic: an attempt to present the devil’s phantasmagoria while revealing the “real” sources of iniquity in Petersburg society: veneration of artifice, blind consumerism, indifference to real art. Perhaps it is art’s natural opposition to the demonic that explains the narrator’s shock at finding an artist in this seat of bureaucracy and business: “This ­exceptional class is extremely rare in a city in which everyone is either a civil servant, a merchant, or a German artisan” (16). He notes that the talent that could have burst into broad, vivid bloom in the healthy atmosphere of Italy (“on by, verno, razvilsia tak zhe vol’no, shiroko i iarko, kak rastenie” [17]) would instead burst into broad, vivid flame in the pale, grey streets of Petersburg (“so vremenem by vspykhnuvshego shiroko i iarko” [33]); the lexical repetition here (shiroko, iarko) highlights the shift in metaphor, from one of organic growth in the fresh Italian air to one of combustion in the unnatural Russian capital. In this reading, art stands opposed to (but is still vulnerable to) the “demonic” order; indeed, the commercial forces at work on Nevsky corrupt and destroy the lofty ideals of the artist Piskarev.76 This is Gogol, however: the narrator is anything but innocuous, and the artist must be treated with equal skepticism; in both cases, what at first glance appears to counter the demonic just might, in fact, be working in tandem with it. Even before he is “infected” by the demonic agents of Nevsky, the artist Piskarev can hardly be considered an innocent. We have already seen how the devil might employ a dazzling woman (krasavitsa mira) or a ­brilliantly lit street (krasavitsa nashei stolitsy) to lure a sinner right up to the lip of hell; we have also seen how the “beauty” of these various entities masks a perverse 76 Similarly, the debasement of two revered German authors into the tinsmith Schiller and the cobbler Hoffmann, as Moeller-Sally points out, represents the “leveling effect of literary commerce” (“0000,” 332).

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sort of disorder, whether it’s the chaotic procession across Anichkov Bridge or the unpleasant untidiness of the brothel. Piskarev’s studio, too, is revealed to contain an i­ndiscriminate jumble of animate and inanimate objects, a combination not unlike the pieces and parts on display on Nevsky or at the Ball: “Plaster arms and legs, which time and dust had turned coffee-colored, broken easels, an overturned palette, a friend of the artist playing the guitar, walls spattered with paints” (17). Meanwhile, although he is a visual artist, Piskarev cannot see things as they really are: he projects onto each subject an idealized version—a plaster-of-Paris Hercules onto an interlocutor, ­Perugino’s Bianca onto his “beauty”—which preoccupies his gaze.77 His canvases, which feature upside-down nymphs sketched over old oeuvres, reflect this p­ iecemeal vision—and offer commentary on narrative art, as well; after all, visually superimposing a plaster head onto a living body is not fundamentally different from textually transforming a lady into a champagne flute. Finally, and most damningly, Piskarev is all too willing to sell his soul—and betray his art—by painting an erotic “beauty” for a Persian shopkeeper in exchange for opium; though this artist might present as an idealist, he readily sells out to the forces of crass commercialism that animate Petersburg. A few days later, as we gaze on Piskarev’s lifeless corpse, the narrator recalls the flicker of talent that never had a chance to ignite: “Thus perished a victim of mad passion—poor Piskarev, quiet, timid, modest, and childishly simple-hearted, bearing within himself a spark of talent [iskra talanta] which might in time have blazed up broadly and brightly [shiroko i iarko]” (33). Perhaps it is simple irony that this young man was consumed by the flames of hell, rather than his own blaze of artistic talent—or perhaps Gogol intended this reiteration of the burning motif as commentary on the link between the all-consuming fire of hell and that of artistic ­production. In any case, there appears to be no difference between the artist and the other sources of deceptive “beauty” in this demonic town: all of them function to mince, merge, and misrepresent. But if Piskarev might have thrived within this inferno—after all, his art is demonstrably demonic in form—then why is he consumed and destroyed? Perhaps the answer lies in the rivalry between the visual and verbal arts as inscribed in Gogol’s tale. 77 For more on Piskarev’s artistic vision, see Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 108–10.

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On the narrative level, the storyteller engages in his own demonic tactics. Those same functions ascribed in the story to the demon and his agents— tempting, leading astray, carving up reality—are correspondingly performed by the narrator. Where the devil draws the eye with streetlights and store windows, the narrator uses verbal pyrotechnics; where one uses beautiful ladies to lead unsuspecting amblers off course, the other leads his unsuspecting readers astray with verbal digression and misdirection. And the devil only knows who is chewing up Nevsky’s passersby into their constituent parts: is it actually a demon, with his tricks of light, or is it the narrator himself? Long before the devil dices and disarranges reality at the ball, Gogol’s narrator performs the same function in his opening phantasmagoria-of-words, in which people are narratively dehumanized, dissected, and reduced to disordered parts, which in turn are reconstituted as bugs, bottles, or balloons. Even words are subject to the hashing: genres collide, and bits and pieces from forthcoming stories (a few of which already existed in draft form) make an appearance on Nevsky: the precursor of the Nose appears at Schiller’s apartment, as the cobbler Hoffmann gets ready to slice off the tinsmith’s thick snout; and earlier in the day, we may have met Kovalev himself: close to two o’clock, we learn, everyone flocks to Nevsky Prospect, including those who just finished “speaking with their doctor about the weather and about the tiny pimple that had just sprung out on their nose” (11). An hour later, an incipient Akakii Akakievich puts in an appearance: at three o’clock, titular councilors hasten by with their heads down; they haven’t fully left their cares behind yet, and “for a long time, instead of seeing shop signs, they see a carton of documents or the plump face of the office director” (14). If Piskarev is an illusionist, grafting ideals onto base reality, then Gogol’s confabulating stand-in is the narrative equivalent of an urban assailant, spinning seductive verbal detours, then slicing up his trusting followers in an alleyway. Clearly, visual and narrative artists play similarly diabolical roles in this deceitful metropolis. The question of art (particularly as it concerns the tale of a starry-eyed painter, as narrated by an especially untrustworthy skaz-spinner) naturally raises the issue of the visual vs. the verbal. One would expect oral imagery to figure prominently in a tale that draws artistic inspiration from the medieval hellmouth, and indeed, the tale is suffused with references to lips and their dual functions of speaking and eating, expressing and consuming. It is hardly a

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surprise that Pirogov should be consoled by a pair of pirozhki; he represents the pursuit and fulfillment of material pleasures, so it is fitting that his story should end with a moment of physical—if not sexual—gratification. It is somewhat more surprising, however, that the painter Piskarev, who is accustomed to dealing in the visual, should be so inspired by the oral on Nevsky Prospect. During their nocturnal flight, it is the Madonna’s mouth—and not her eyes— that becomes the locus of the artist’s fantasies, as he projects his own visions onto her lips: “Her lips [usta] were sealed by a whole swarm of the most wonderful reveries. All that remains of childhood memories, brought on by dreams and quiet inspiration by glowing lamplight—all this seemed to blend and merge and be reflected in her harmonious lips” (18).78 Even Piskarev’s name is associated with orality: derived from -pisk-, or “squeak,” the name represents the ultimate diminution of oral expression (just as Pirogov’s ­epitomizes—and trivializes—ingestion). The lopsided interplay between the oral and the visual continues as the harlot’s smile—or the semblance of one—throws Piskarev into paroxysms of self-doubt, leading him to wonder whether his eyes have been deceived by a trick of the light. Later on, when he reinstates the divinity of his fallen beauty in his imagination, he imagines her lips delivering sweet orders. When they do actually part, however, it is invariably to drop some vulgar inanity (“she parted her lovely lips and began to say something, but it was all so stupid, so vulgar” [21]), leading him to wish her mouth unusable: “Oh, better you were mute and totally deprived of speech than to utter such words!” (32). The artist seeks to silence his object: to render her, in effect, as lifeless as one of his portraits; his entreaty, which literally deprives her of a tongue—luchshe by ty byla . . . lishena vovse iazyka—dismembers her as skillfully as the narrator does. When his artistic vision fails him (his eyes blinded by a smile, the sweet voice of his dream girl coarsening in waking life), Piskarev turns to the oral (opium) in order to regain access to the ideal/visual. He approaches a Persian shopkeeper and agrees to sell a piece of art for the dark drops of opium that will restore his 78 Gogol’s unfailing use of the high-style usta to describe the beautiful girl’s mouth may be a reference to the Usta adovy, one of the most common conventional terms for the hellmouth. My thanks to M. R. Maizuls for his insights into conventional Russian expressions for the hellmouth (personal communication, annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages [AATSEEL], Boston, Massachusetts, January 5, 2013).

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dream visions. The Persian demands a portrait of himself lying beside a “beauty” with black eyes “as big as olives.” Piskarev complies, trading in on a piece of erotic art that conflates the visual (eyes) and the edible (olives), and thus reducing his own art to a consumable product.79 It is certainly no mistake that the two figures in the text most explicitly associated with the demonic (both of whom are likely agents of the “devil himself,” who employs them to scavenge food for the hellmouth) are linked to the oral: Piskarev’s adventure with the dark Madonna illuminates the mouth as a site of illusion, deception, and vulgarity; and the mysterious foreigner trades opium for erotic food art. The carefully enumerated talents of the poshlyi Pirogov are also entirely “oral” in nature: whether indiscriminately reciting poetry, blowing smoke rings, recounting anecdotes about cannons and unicorns, discussing actresses or dancers, plugging his pie-hole with pastry, or hinting about his new rank, the lieutenant is fully immersed in the oral pleasures of the Russian capital. The overall drive in the story is one of the elevation of the mouth—with its ­associations of the body and venality—and the simultaneous degradation of the eyes—which at that time Gogol associated with spiritual values: in ­“Sculpture, Painting, and Music” (1834), the essay that opens Arabesques, visual art provides a bridge between sensuality and spirituality.80 On Nevsky ­Prospect, the soldier employs the faculty of sight to spot his prey, solely in order to indulge his baser urges; meanwhile, the artist’s vision is systematically debased—misled, 79 The line between food and body—the oral/real vs. the visual/dream—is not the only one that is blurred here; the Persian’s ungrammatical request (“a ia sama chtoby lezhala vozle nee i kurila trubku!” PSS, 3:29) fogs the line between male and female, bringing to mind an earlier moment at the brothel, where woman, the “beauty of the world,” loses her purity and is degraded to the equal of man: she “is transformed into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with all purity of soul, she loses all that is feminine and revoltingly adopts the manners and insolence of the male and has ceased to be that delicate, beautiful creature that so differs from us” (21). The disarray in the brothel, “which is usually only found in the carefree room of a bachelor” (20), had likewise been associated with masculinity. The ambiguous gender of the beauty and the Persian, who work in tandem to lure Piskarev toward his fate, suggests that beneath their earthly guise lies a true identity—one that is slippery, indeterminate, and unearthly in origin. 80 Even in this early statement on aesthetics and morality, Gogol subordinates the visual (painting) to the audible (music), which is associated with pure spirit. Much has been written on the visual (and the contrast between visual and verbal) in Gogol’s art; see in particular Maguire, Exploring Gogol (esp. “The Art of Seeing,” 97–114; and “From Eye to Word,” 181–213); and Bely, Gogol’s Artistry (esp. “The Pictorial Aspect,” 141–240).

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sold out, and relegated to dreams—only to be replaced by the oral. Petersburg emerges as the capital of those values exemplified by the oral (­ triviality, deceit, consumption), at the fatal expense of those epitomized by the visual (divinity, dreams, art). In short, Gogol appears to spotlight the visual—discarded pre-Petrine counterpart to the verbal— only to reveal their irreconcilability in Peter's city, where visuality bows to orality and its attendant pleasures: the painter is entrapped by the lips of a demon, reduced to rendering consumable body parts, and finally devoured by the flames of hell. But when the oral is linked primarily to consumption, (olives, pastries, abysmal mouth), the creative logos appears as vulnerable as visual art.

“Everything happens in reverse”: Mapping the Mouth of Hell The natural opposition of eye and mouth is not the only one that is confounded or reversed in the world of “Nevsky Prospect”: associated binaries (spirit/belly, up/down, alive/dead, holy/demonic, etc.) are likewise upended, so that up is down and alive is dead in this re-envisioning of Peter’s capital. This reversal is right at home in Gogol’s creative world, which is so richly informed by folk logic. As Lotman and Uspensky suggest, the dualistic cosmology of the Russian folk imagination stems from the “essential polarity” of Russian culture.81 ­Leatherbarrow observes that such polarities have both directional and moral connotations: heaven is up, while the inferno is down; God gathers the ­r ighteous to his right side, while the left side belongs to the devil.82 In folk belief, as we have seen, threshold spaces represent a conduit through which devils may pass from their world into ours, or across which such polarities might be reversed; mirrors offer an ideal example of this sort of space, boundaries between this world and “a 81 Iurii M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskii, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 31. In this schema, Leatherbarrow notes, the absence of a “neutral value field between opposing extremes” means that what is not created by God must be “tot mir” (“that world”: the domain of evil spirits) (Devil’s Vaudeville, 4). See also Spieker on liminal zones, in which two binary spheres (up/down, good/evil) mix and converge (“Centrality of the Middle,” 469). 82 Leatherbarrow, Devil’s Vaudeville, 4.

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‘sinister’ world of inverted reflections.”83 Lotman has commented on Gogol’s fondness for “‘a landscape reflected in water, that is to say a space in which the concept of above and below has been practically removed’”—in other words, a space in which the traditional moral associations of up/ down have been reversed.84 Petersburg, a shimmering cosmos miraculously suspended over the Finnish gulf and the broad Neva, is a veritable city of mirrors—a typical ­illustration of the city from the eighteenth or nineteenth century featured its famous neoclassical facades, their watery reflections shimmering in the waters below. Perhaps this prevalence of the mirror-image explains the instability that governs Gogol’s Petersburg; as his narrator muses, “How marvelously our world is arranged! [. . .] Everything happens in reverse” (Divno ustroen svet nash! . . . vse proiskhodit naoborot [45]). The blurring of the up/down axis in “Nevsky Prospect” (along with its attendant metaphorical connotations) is evident both spatially and spiritually.85 As Graffy notes, the ladder [lestnitsa]— Gogol’s principal symbol of spiritual aspiration—is frequently employed in the Petersburg tales, only to be debased.86 In “Nevsky Prospect,” various lestnitsy carry Piskarev and his dark temptress up to her brothel, direct the dreaming Piskarev into the diabolically disarranged ball, and lead the devil to his s­ eductive street lamps. Piskarev’s perception of his “Bianca”—she of the “divine features” 83 Ibid., 7. 84 Iu. M. Lotman, “O realizme Gogolia,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Literaturovedenie), Novaia seriia (Tartu, 1996), 2: 12; translation in Graffy, “Devil Is in the Detail,” 246. Richard Peace has written extensively on the reflected world of Gogol’s early fiction, in which mirror-like surfaces of water invert the natural world; in the opening section of The Fair at Sorochintsy, for instance, the sky is an ocean, and the river “presents everything upside-down” (“The Mirror-world of Gogol’s Early Stories,” in Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context, ed. Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell [Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1989], 19–33). In these stories, natural laws (such as those r­ egulating sexuality) are also disrupted; Peace notes that such Gogolian disorder “is reminiscent of the inverted world (iznanochnyy mir) which played a significant role in medieval humour” (33n10). See also William Woodin Rowe, Through Gogol’s Looking Glass: Reverse Vision, False Focus, and Precarious Logic (New York: New York University Press, 1976); and Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 84–85. 85 “But perhaps the most notable demonic distortion of spatial coordinates concerns the ­treatment of the vertical axis, in the demolition of the stable spiritual significance afforded to it by Gogol in his earlier vision of paradise” (Graffy, “Devil Is in the Detail,” 245). 86 For scriptural sources of the ladder symbol, as well as Gogol’s elaboration of the motif in his spiritual writings (and in his dying words), see ibid., 246–47.

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and “heavenly gaze” who has alighted from on high—likewise demonstrates his confusion of the demonic with the holy.87 Naturally, when Piskarev discovers the less-than-celestial profession of his ersatz Madonna, he surmises that she must have been cast into hell by some cackling demon: “by the terrible will of some infernal spirit [adskii dukh] who wishes to destroy the harmony of life, she has been cast, with a loud laugh, into the abyss” (22). The irony is that he’s right—he just doesn’t realize that he has flown in right behind her. Olga Dilaktorskaia relates Gogol’s vertical inversions to the “vice-versa paintings” (kartinki oborotni) of Russian lubok, in which visual reversals reflect thematic reversals;88 it is also likely that the author drew inspiration from the two-tiered vertep theater. Gogol’s familiarity with the puppet theater tradition has been meticulously detailed by a century of scholars, who concur that he borrowed character types, themes, and devices from vertep, particularly in his early works.89 Madhu Malik goes further, arguing that “the duality of Gogol’’s artistic vision”—the narrative principle of alternation between comic and serious, evident throughout his oeuvre—derives from the physical structure and organizing principle of vertep theater.90 In vertep, the dichotomy between sacred and profane was reflected in the structure of the stage: serious scenes played out on the upper “heavenly” level, while comic episodes were enacted beneath.91 The down/up structure of Gogol’s Petersburg calls to mind an ­overturned vertep, in which the human (profane) action takes place on the 87 Graffy, too, notes this metaphysical misperception in his section on women in Gogol’s Petersburg (ibid., 262–64). 88 Dilaktorskaia, “Khudozhestvennyi mir,” 224. 89 For more on Gogol’s relationship to vertep, see V. N. Peretts, “Gogol’ i malorusskaia ­literaturnaia traditsiia,” in N. V. Gogol’: Rechi, posviashchennye ego pamiati . . . (St. Petersburg, 1902), 47–55; A. P. Kadlubovskii, Gogol’ v ego otnosheniiakh k starinnoi malorusskoi literature (Nizhyn, 1911); Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 40–58; Gavriel Shapiro, “The Hussar: A Few Observations on Gogol’s Characters and Their Vertep Prototype,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 9, no. 1–2 (1985): 133–38; and Madhu Malik, “Vertep and the Sacred/ Profane Dichotomy in Gogol”s Dikan’ka Stories,” Slavic and East European Journal 34, no. 3 (1990): 332–47. 90 Malik, “Vertep and the Sacred/Profane Dichotomy,” 332–37. 91 For a detailed account of the tradition, see V. N. Peretts, Kukul’nyi teatr na Rusi (St. ­Petersburg, 1898). Makaryk’s study also makes note of the less common three-story vertep, the lowest level of which corresponded to hell (Makaryk, About the Harrowing of Hell, 48–49); see also Irene Rima Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, Modernism in Kyiv: Kiev/Kyïv/ Kiev/Kijów/Kiev. Jubilant Experimentation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 440n34, which similarly makes note of a third region corresponding to hell.

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upper level, while the metaphysical (in this case, demonic) transpires just beneath.92 Gogol hints at the bottom-heavy structure of this world through pervasive references to the vertical axis: the narrator looks up from below, the demon climbs up to light his lamps, the beauty flies up to the brothel, the carriages tumble down into the abyss; meanwhile, although the creator is frequently invoked, the “heavenly” is patently absent or debased. All this combines to suggest a reverse “order” to the disorder of Gogol’s Petersburg, a profoundly unnatural space in which the population decomposes hour by hour, black whiskers sprout only from the cheeks of men in the foreign office,93 and the sun is replaced by the brilliant shop windows of Nevsky Prospect. Gogol’s attention to spatial orientation has an even earlier precursor in traditional iconography, where horizontal opposition plays an essential role in interpretation. According to Boris Uspensky, right and left are traditionally reversed in iconographic scholarship: ikonovedy consider the images not from their own perspective, but from that of an “internal observer imagined to be inside the represented world.”94 As Himka explains, this convention derives from the gospel of Matthew, which differentiates right and left from the ­perspective of Jesus’s judgment of souls: “and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left” (Mt. 25:33); the rules of iconography thus dictate 92 Malik discusses Gogol’s preservation of the vertep division between the sacred (which includes both the heavenly and the demonic) and the profane. In her schema, which collapses the upper and lower metaphysical realms into a single level (encompassing both salvation and terror), Gogol’s duality corresponds to the two-tiered structure of vertep, even in the absence of a “heavenly” level (“Vertep and the Sacred/Profane Dichotomy,” 232–47). 93 Although such specifications seem absurd, in post-Petrine Russia, style was inextricably tied to hierarchy: everything from the color of one’s coat to the length of one’s collar was determined by one’s place in the pecking order. In 1834 (the year Gogol was composing “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Nose”), Nicholas I issued a decree regulating his subjects’ appearance even more precisely, distributing “a detailed dress code for civilians of all ranks, and colored drawings made by the artist Ivanov” with explanations and instructions. See Olga Vainshtein, “Sarafan for Court Ladies: Gendering Court Uniform in Russia,” in Die zivile Uniform als symbolische Kommunikation/Civilian Uniforms as Symbolic Communication, ed. Elisabeth Hackspiel-Mikosch (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006), 124; and L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII–nachalo XX v. (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 1999), 131–256. Nicholas even standardized facial hair—clean-shaven for civilians, black mustaches for officers (dyed, if need be)— carrying out the tonsorial enterprise of the nation’s original barber, Peter; Gogol is simply taking these sartorial regulations to the extreme in his fictional Petersburg. 94 B. A. Uspenskii, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon (Lisse, The Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976), 36–37.

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that saints be depicted to Christ’s right and sinners to His left.95 Accordingly, in all traditional icons of the Last Judgment, the mouth of hell and its dancing demons threaten from the sinister side of the enthroned Christ (although, from the viewer’s point of view, the mouth yawns open in the bottom-right corner).96 Lubok, which derived its aesthetic conventions from icon painting, is somewhat more flexible in its placement and orientation of the hellmouth. These folk-art prints generally follow iconographic principles in situating hell, though the hellmouth occasionally shifts to the opposite corner, particularly in lubki depicting popular, nonevangelical subjects like the drunkard selling his soul to the devil. Likewise, on the medieval stage (and correspondingly in the vertep theater), the hellmouth awaited its sinners stage left (the sinister side), while angels blew their trumpets stage right; from the perspective of the anxious audience member, then, the entrance to hell loomed on the right-hand side (just as it does in a Last Judgment icon). We have seen how the devil emerges at dusk to light the lamps lining “Nevsky Prospect,” transfiguring the street into a metaphorical river of fire that leads directly into the arch of the General Staff Building. But how does this 95 Himka, Last Judgment Iconography, 23. 96 This orientation (demons on the “left-hand” side of the icon) holds true for all traditional iconographic scenes in which Hell holds out a threat to sinners (specifically, The Last Judgment and The Ladder of Divine Ascent). Interestingly, Orthodox icons of the Resurrection and Descent into Hell—in which the soul of the crucified Christ descends into the realm of the dead to bring salvation to the righteous—conventionally depict the mouth of hell in the opposite corner, at the “right-hand side” of the triumphant Christ (see Henry Hundt and Raoul Smith, “A Teratological Source of Hellhead,” Journal of Icon Studies (March 2013): 3, http://museumofrussianicons.org/research/index.php/publications/journal-of-icon-studies/2013-mar-hundt-smith-source-of-hellhead/. In these scenes—in which demons are defeated by the risen Christ, who pulls redeemed sinners from hell’s jaws—the demonic no longer holds its “sinister” power; this transfer of authority explains the hellmouth’s shift from its traditional left-hand position. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Raoul Smith of the Museum of Russian Icons, who organized two panels titled The Semiotics of Demons in Russian Icons and Literature at the 2013 AATSEEL convention in Boston, Massachusetts ( January 5, 2013). Many of my insights into the spatial orientation of the hellmouth in Orthodox iconography were drawn from presentations at these two panels, as well as from personal correspondence with Smith following the conference. For more on the semiotics of the demonic in traditional iconography, see M. R. Maizul’s, “Smert’ v drevnerusskoi vizual’noi ikonografii: Konstruirovanie obraza,” and D. I. Antonov, “Krugi ada, ili ‘Dantovskie siuzhety’ v russkoi ikonografii XVI–XVIII vv.,” both in In umbra: Demonologiia kak semioticheskaia sistema. Al’manakh 1, ed. D. I. Antonov and O. B. Khristoforova (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2012), 1:151–98, 199–246.

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“Petersburg hellmouth,” as charted in Gogol’s narrative, align with these ­traditional representations of the hellmouth in icons and folk art? Nevsky ­Prospect is one of three radial axes that stretch out from Admiralty Square to shape and define the grid of central Petersburg. Originating just off Palace Square in the shadow of the Admiralty spire, Nevsky cuts southeast through the center of the city to the Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery, a single line symbolically connecting the empire’s two axes of power: state and church. In the first line of the story, Gogol defines Nevsky Prospect as constituting everything in ­Petersburg—“dlia [Peterburga] on sostavliaiet vse”—and over the next few pages, Gogol redraws the map of the city to fit this assessment. He begins his famous “tour” of Nevsky by effectively eliminating its urban surroundings. He depopulates the city’s further reaches, naming four far-flung districts of the city (Petersburg, Vyborg, Peski, Moscow Gate), the inhabitants of which are said to encounter one another only on Nevsky; he further isolates the thoroughfare by naming four neighboring streets (Morskaia, Gorokhovaia, Liteinyi, ­Meshchanskaia), only to dismiss them and their inhabitants as inferior. In short, he sets a narrative frame around Nevsky, narrowing the reader’s gaze from the city as a whole to its central district, then illuminating this single, central boulevard.97 Gogol’s redrawn map of the city consists of a single, bright, diagonal line running from the city center (the Admiralty) to the bottom right-hand corner (the Monastery). The arch of the General Staff Building—the “mouth” of the Prospect—is poised at the top of the street, close to the epicenter of the city. This geographical layout would appear to be at odds with the Last Judgment orientation of icon, lubok, medieval stage, and vertep—indeed, in the textual world of “Nevsky Prospect,” the conventional icon is turned on its head: at sundown, St. Petersburg is transformed into a sort of anti-icon of the Last ­Judgment, with a Hellmouth gaping in the center—in place of the enthroned Christ—and a glowing trail of streetlamps leading in sinners from below. But in   97 It is here that our straying heroes Piskarev and Pirogov—who have crept so close to the Nevsky hellmouth that their elongated shadows nearly touch the Police Bridge over the Moika—are targeted by their two fatal temptresses: Piskarev is drawn toward the brothel on Liteinyi Prospect, and Pirogov in the opposite direction, toward the artisan’s district on Meshchanskaia Street, near the Kazan Cathedral. It is interesting that both men fly off toward streets that have already been mentioned and eliminated by Gogol—clearly, they are already headed for the narrative abyss!

Body Parts, Puff Pastries, and the Devil Himself

the anti-logical world of Gogol, in which “everything happens in reverse,” this inverted icon is right at home—in fact, this Gogolian anti-icon appears to reflect the upside-down logic of the capital. In the Petersburg of Gogol’s tales, the traditional hierarchical relationship between sacred and earthly concerns has been upended: the orientation of Nevsky emblematizes the new relationship, with offices of the state (military and government, including the residence of the tsar) occupying the head of the street, and spiritual matters (the monastery) forgotten at its tail.98 But Christ is displaced by more than bureaucracy: Petersburg is also a city of commerce, as exemplified by the well-lit windows, foreign wares, and painted whores on display along Nevsky Prospect. The street, a dazzling monument to m ­ ercantilism, exemplifies the power and centrality of commerce in Peter’s city; with its oil lamps lit, it leads from the monastery to the arch: away from the holy and right to the mouth of the unholy. The narrative hellmouth and the fiery river that feeds it—Nevsky Prospect, with its alluring oil lamps lit—together ­represent the city’s worldly interests. Matters of the spirit have been displaced by the concerns of government and marketplace, a perverted relationship reflected in Gogol’s revised map of the capital, which quite literally spotlights the city’s state and commercial elements, while omitting the spiritual from the picture. As we have seen, the rival functions of the oral—ingestion (belly) and expression (spirit)—overlap in the image of the hellmouth. The limitations and ­possibilities of both are on display in Gogol’s tale, and on two levels: the triviality of human orality (seduction, gluttony, and other sinful acts that might deliver their ­perpetrators to the mouth of hell) contends with the terrible power of “sacred” orality (narrative creation, infernal consumption). In this vertep-like vertical divide, both narrator and hellmouth occupy the metaphysical dimension (the author’s word competes against Peter’s demonic city), and the “animating” acts of one are as devastating as the digestive functions of the other. Naturally, the spiritual inversion of the city extends to the realm of aesthetics, as art is downgraded to artifice. As a number of scholars have observed, Gogol was convinced that art was capable of ushering both the divine   98 The same holds true in other Petersburg tales of the same period: cf. “The Nose,” in which Kazan Cathedral stands empty on a major feast day (and which Gogol composed ­simultaneously with the stories of Arabesques; see the commentary to the Petersburg tales in PSS, 3:638–39).

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and the demonic into the world; indeed, the tension between these two poles would define the trajectory of both his artistic output and his spiritual life.99 Ideally, the artist should perform an act of transfiguration: by creating the world anew through the purity of his vision, he shows us the world as it should be. The artists of “Nevsky Prospect,” however, fail to penetrate or reveal: the narrator— like the devil—deforms and disarranges, leaving devastation in place of creation; and the painter himself can’t perceive reality—he even trades his art as payment for illusions. This inversion of aesthetic purpose is plotted out in Gogol’s new map of Petersburg, which inverts the Orthodox icon. The icon inspires virtue by focusing on the holy, reserving only a corner of the panel for terror. By contrast, Gogol’s art (as embodied in the travestied Last Judgment icon at the heart of “Nevsky Prospect”) highlights terror, leaving only a corner (just beyond the bounds of the map) for the holy.100 In commercial Petersburg, where everything is for sale and everything is illuminated, decorated, or ­otherwise disguised, the messianic function of art (to purify, to redeem, and to inspire) falls to the demonic function (to corrupt, degrade, deform, and damn). In “Nevsky Prospect,” the city whose origins lay in the expressive voice has been figuratively transformed into a devouring mouth. The Petersburg of Gogol is no longer associated with the life-giving Word but rather with an orifice that ingests and excretes. Pushkin’s Petersburg tales were enlivened by the ­unexpected animation of the inanimate: the statue in The Bronze Horseman and the playing card in “The Queen of Spades.” Here, however, humans are ­consistently reduced to their constituent parts, which are in turn transformed into new objects; the animate is deanimated, the human dehumanized. The metaphorical deanimation of Pushkin’s Petersburg—Evgenii sitting motionless astride his stone lion; Germann turning to stone as he awaits the Countess—is   99 For Gogol’s complicated relationship to art and its demonic/divine possibilities, see Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 111–24; Fanger, Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 114; V. V. Gippius, Gogol, ed. Robert A. Maguire (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981), 50–53; Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 57–65; and D. S. Merezhkovsky, “Gogol and the Devil,” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 57–102. For more general explorations of the Russian conception of art as demonic, see Davidson, “Divine Service or Idol Worship?”; Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 38–48; and Leatherbarrow, Devil’s Vaudeville, 23–26. 100 This inversion recalls the artistic binary of “The Portrait,” in which the struggling artist Chertkov (who finds commercial success under the influence of a demonic portrait) is opposed to the original painter of the portrait (who ultimately finds redemption in the desert and becomes an icon painter).

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taken to the extreme in Gogol’s, where men are replaced by their own mustaches and ladies are nothing but dainty waists and slippers. Gogol has inherited the unnatural order outlined by Pushkin and elaborated it into an entire upsidedown empire on the Neva, where the interests of state and commerce trump those of the spirit, and art is overshadowed by artifice. And, as we have seen, this perverse, reflected kingdom, whose only deity emerges at night to draw sinners down below, is arrayed along the contours of an inverted Last Judgment icon, its hellmouth gaping open at the center. If the Nevsky hellmouth reverses the spatial semiotics of the Last Judgment icon, its position at the tail end of Gogol’s tale mimics, in narrative terms, the placement of the icon in a church.101 Just as the Last Judgment icon presents departing worshipers with a graphic reminder of what awaits those who stray too far from the Orthodox liturgy, the narrator’s final, apocalyptic declamation offers readers his own textual warning about devilish lights, hooded dames, and the degraded place of art in this new imperial capital. Ultimately, Petersburg emerges as the natural habitat of a devouring demon: an otherworldly force that chews up “reality” and shits out tantalizing “beauty,” whether in the form of Nevsky Prospect, women—or even art itself. In the final passages of a story that vitalizes the rivalry between the verbal and visual arts, Gogol introduces one final pre-Petrine image—and not just any image but a sacred, iconic one. In nineteenth-century Petersburg, however, this image is not redemptive (conveying the Word of God) but destructive (consuming all of creation), just as the oral chews and consumes, rather than expresses and animates. What does this final image imply about the position of the creative/divine logos in Gogol’s Petersburg? The preceding tale illuminated the uneasy coexistence of the visual and the verbal, the textual and the oral, establishing a sort of aesthetic hierarchy: visual art is diminished by verbal art, while the textual is baked and consumed by the oral. This seeming triumph of orality does not assure the security of the creative logos, however: the authorial word still generates and animates everything from marching mustaches to wafting waists, but those monstrous verbal creations are then consumed and destroyed in the narrative mouth of hell. The Petersburg logos is both creative 101 I would like to thank Raoul Smith for this observation; e-mail message to author, March 5, 2013.

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and destructive, and the story’s closing apocalypse—which the narrator renders in almost painterly style, from the very lip of the abyss—blends expression and ingestion in a terrifying final reunion of word and image. The image of a ­hellmouth at the center of the anti-icon signifies both demonic Petersburg and the demonic possibilities of art; the figure expresses Gogol’s growing anxieties surrounding both his new home and his new occupation. The twin tales of Piskarev and Pirogov that originate on Nevsky express Gogol’s ambivalent ­feelings about art: its messianic purpose (to counter the forces of chaos to create order and beauty) does battle with its demonic function (to jumble cosmos and spread artifice), and by the end it’s clear which side is the victor: narrative art, like the ladies and lights on Nevsky, functions to lead men off course and lure them like flies into the infernal jaws at its head. Clearly, the act of creating is fraught with danger—leading us to wonder about the fate of those who consume those created works. Gogol’s narrator warns us of many dangers that reside in Petersburg (women, devils, Nevsky), but he fails to warn us about himself; after all, by inviting us to enter the phantasmagoric world of “Nevsky Prospect,” he summons us directly into the inferno. Perhaps the tale represents a long preparation and “baking” of Gogol’s own artistic order, one which opens and closes in a sort of narrative hellmouth: the chasm that gapes between true artistic ideals and the vulgar mercantilism displayed on Nevsky. This yawning maw, eloquently expressing Gogol’s anxiety over the place of art in Russia’s radiant capital of fashion and façade, is the gap into which the narrator himself dissolves at twilight. Read in this light, the narrator’s final lines read less as a warning than as a trap as he draws us, his readers, up to the very mouth of hell.

4 Mertvye ushi The Annunciation Motif and Disorder of the Senses in “The Nose”

In 1906, the Symbolist poet-critic Innokentii Annensky closed his article on “The Portrait” with an extraordinary statement on Gogol’s depiction of the human ­condition, isolating two features of the face—the nose and the eyes—to illustrate the ultimate irreconcilability of body and soul: “Gogol wrote two stories: one he devoted to the nose, the other to the eyes. The first is a humorous story, the second— horrifying. If we place these two emblems—of corporeality and of spirituality—side by side [. . .] then we feel if only for a moment all the impossibility, all the absurdity of a being who combines in himself nose and eyes, body and soul.”1 David Sloane takes this provocative premise as a possible key to discerning the unity of Gogol’s Petersburg tales, extending Annensky’s observation over the remaining stories; his reading suggests one underlying yet unexplored theme of the cycle: the enigma of the human face, which is “metaphorically dismembered or otherwise devalued in the impersonal environment of the Russian capital.”2 In Sloane’s fascinating   1 I. F. Annenskii, Knigi otrazhenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 19–20. English translation adapted from Sergei Bocharov, “Around ‘The Nose’,” trans. Susanne Fusso, in Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 20.   2 David Sloane, “The Name as Phonetic Icon: A Reconsideration of Onomastic Significance in Gogol’s ‘the Overcoat,’” Slavic and East European Journal 35, no. 4 (1991): 484.

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e­ laboration of the theme, “The Overcoat” becomes a story about the mouth, the locus of self-expression; “Nevsky Prospect” presents only disembodied fragments in its famous parade of parts; and “Notes of a Madman” is about the “face as such,” the expression and assertion of the self.3 Although, in the end, the cycle fails to cohere into a single, easily intelligible map of the human face, the diminished senses catalogued in each story—eyes that don’t see straight, noses that disappear, mouths that can’t express—bare the spiritual degradation of Peter’s city; as each aspect of the human physiognomy is corrupted in turn, its associated inner qualities are lost. It may be less useful to identify the single sense organ that each story is “about,” however, than to read the tales as a series of battles among the features of the face, as each struggles for ascendancy in the materialistic new world of the Russian capital. As detailed in the previous chapter, for instance, on “Nevsky Prospect”—the ­phantasmagoric narrative of a visual artist and a pleasure-seeking epicurean—the eye (associated with art and spirituality) is subordinated to the all-consuming mouth. Likewise, while “The Nose” would appear to be about, well, the nose, this chapter will reveal the story’s other sensual cynosure. All this fleshly disruption is tied to the slippery role of narrative in the new capital. In Gogol’s Petersburg, the eye—ever vulnerable to demonic beauty—is easily bewitched, while the hungry mouth grows to the size of the General Staff building’s archway; the tricky text maneuvers the reader’s gaze past the daytime pageantry of Nevsky and all the way up to the well-lit arch that gapes at dusk by tale’s end. Pirogov consumes easily digestible tabloids with his tea, not realizing that he himself has already been consumed by the monstrous, materialist street; meanwhile, we devour Gogol’s narrative, not realizing that we, too, are being led directly into the Nevsky hellmouth. And “Nevsky Prospect” is hardly the only Petersburg tale through which Gogol traces the role of language: it seems that in Gogol’s literary universe, as in Peter’s city, emblems of power (sidewhiskers, badges, etc.) consistently compete with the creative word for authority, and the author’s next entries in the Petersburg cycle continue to track the word, both written and spoken. Of those stories composed and published alongside “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Nose” and “Notes of a Madman,” in particular, ­highlight the terrible, wayward power of language. In “Notes,” Aksenty Ivanovich ­Poprishchin loses control of the signifying system he’s part of—even the   3 Ibid., 484–85.

Mertvye ushi

Christian name Aksenty calls attention to its holder’s association with the spoken word: with its aural likeness to aktsent, it suggests a certain skewed ­relationship to language. Though Poprishchin—in stark contrast to Akakii Akakievich, that other middle-aged copy clerk—is presented as a “writing subject” (the story takes the form of his increasingly unhinged journal entries), the words he attempts to manipulate soon slip beyond his reach; over the course of the story the bonds of language dissolve, leaving its constituent parts to ­reassemble on their own, seemingly at whim. Critics have pointed to the hero’s grammatical deficiencies (Richard Gregg ingeniously demonstrates how he loses his grasp on the genitive case),4 and his fondness for meaningless w ­ ordplay (Peace has suggested that the narrative focal point Ispanie is merely a near-anagram of pisanie, devoid of anything but formal significance) as evidence for the scribe’s verbal slippage.5 Indeed, by the final diary entry, words fly apart and turn somersaults, their letters recombining in senseless anarchy. This verbal inventiveness does not give Poprishchin more “power,” however—rather, the words seem to have taken control of themselves; by story’s end, the hero has completely lost control over the signifying system, and has been written out of the sociolinguistic order. “The Nose” was composed almost simultaneously with “Notes,” and the two stories share a preoccupation with escaping words.6 Though at first glance it might appear the most straightforward of Gogol’s Petersburg tales, “The Nose” actively resists easy interpretation. Pushkin himself affectionately called it a jest (shutka),7 and subsequent critics followed suit in avoiding serious analysis. Traditional criticism of “The Nose” has focused primarily on the story’s sociological or psychoanalytic elements. Sociological   4 Richard Gregg, “Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’: The Fallible Scribe and the Sinister Bulge,” Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 3 (1999): 441.   5 Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 129.   6 As one anonymous reviewer notes, the surname Poprishchin (from pryshchik, pimple) links him to the pimple on Kovalev’s nose—is he, in some sense, the embodiment of the runaway appendage?   7 Pushkin published the story in 1836, in the third issue of his journal The Contemporary (Sovremennik), following its rejection (for filthy subject matter) from the reputable literary journal The Moscow Observer (Moskovskii nabliudatel’). He introduced it with an editorial note: “For a long time, N. V. Gogol would not agree to publish this jest, but we found in it so much that was unexpected, fantastic, entertaining, and original, that we have persuaded him to allow us to share with the public the pleasure his manuscript has afforded us.” See the editor’s commentary to the Petersburg tales in Gogol, PSS, 3:649–50.

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interpretations highlight Gogol’s exposé of the absurdities of rank and social standing, reading Kovalev’s tale as a dramatization of status anxiety. ­Psychoanalytic critics, following Ermakov’s pioneering reading of the hero’s sexual anxiety and Freudian repressions, interpret the nose as a phallic symbol of authority and status; such psychosexual readings are amply supported by the play of ­“masculine” symbols in Gogol’s fictive universe: buttons, badges, sabers, and sidewhiskers compete to display their wearers’ dominance. Formalist critics attempt to make sense of the seeming nonsense by sorting its surface elements; Vinogradov, for instance, assembled an entire compendium of nose-related literary and linguistic sources which illuminate, but fail to penetrate, the story. In addition to these long-established interpretive keys, a handful of scholars have recently begun to expose the story’s hidden religious elements, although these strands have not yet been woven into a satisfactory, coherent reading.8 A few perceptive recent readings of the story have focused on its metaliterary level, presenting “The Nose” as Gogol’s original submission to contemporary debates over literary form and the place and purpose of writing.9 My own reading does not seek to challenge any of these; rather, it seeks to ­integrate the Christological and narrative planes to reveal the relationship between nose and Word, flesh and spirit, and to examine how these elements operate within their specific Petersburg context.

Bread and Blood: A Petersburg Eucharist This chapter takes as its starting point the opening lines of the story, which encompass the major themes of the tale: On the 25th of March, an extraordinarily strange event took place in Petersburg. The barber Ivan Iakovlevich who lives on Voznesensky [Ascension] Prospect (his family name has been lost, and even on his   8 For a fascinating catalog and analysis of the story’s hidden Christian subtexts, see Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 228–37. For a brief reading that incorporates Christian elements, see Laszlo Tikos, “The Petersburg Stories,” in Gogol’s Art: A Search for Identity, http://www.samizdat. com/gogol6.html.   9 See in particular Thomas Seifrid, “Suspicion toward Narrative: The Nose and the Problem of Autonomy in Gogol’s ‘Nos,’” Russian Review 52, no. 3 (1993): 382–96; and Moeller-Sally, “0000.”

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shop sign—on which a gentleman with lathered cheek is depicted, along with the inscription “We also let blood”—nothing more appears), the barber Ivan Iakovlevich woke up rather early and sensed the aroma of hot bread.10 These opening lines embed the entire earthly drama of Christ’s life: March 25th marks the Orthodox Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating the moment of the divine Incarnation (flesh, human), while Ivan Iakovlevich’s address on ­Ascension Street suggests the consummation of His union with God (spirit, divine). Between these extremes of conception and resurrection, Christ’s mortal body and blood are evoked in the scent of Praskovia Osipovna’s hot buns and Ivan Iakovlevich’s advertisement for bloodletting; the apposition of bread and blood seems to imply an incomplete consecration of the sacramental bread and wine. The nose is discovered in Ivan Iakovlevich’s roll, which serves as a sort of sham communion bread.11 In the sacrament of the Eucharist the bread turns to flesh through the mystery of transubstantiation; here, in a parodic puncturing of the miracle, Kovalev’s inert flesh mysteriously turns up inside the barber’s bun. In other words, in place of the miraculous bread-to-body ­transformation we get an ordinary chunk of the body trapped in an ordinary slice of bread. Ivan Iakovlevich’s solemn preparations for the breaking of the bread—he dons a special garment “for propriety” (dlia prilichiia) and adopts a meaningful mien (sdelavshii znachitel’nuiu minu) (49)—heighten the mystery and seriousness of the ritual. Such glimmers of church ceremony achieve deeper significance in light of Gogol’s own understanding of the Orthodox liturgy.12 In his 10 “Марта 25 числа случилось в Петербурге необыкновенно странное происшествие. Цирюльник Иван Яковлевич, живущий на Вознесенском проспекте (фамилия его утрачена, и даже на вывеске его—где изображен господин с запыленною щекою и надписью: “И кровь отворяют”—не выставлено ничего более), цирюльник Иван Яковлевич проснулся довольно рано и услышал запах горячего хлеба” (Gogol, PSS, 3:49). Hereafter, references to “The Nose,” found in volume 3 of the Polnoe sobranie, will be identified parenthetically by page number only. 11 In Orthodoxy, leavened bread is used in place of the Western Church’s communion wafer. 12 Gogol’s lifelong fascination with the liturgy is most fully displayed in his posthumously published Meditations on the Divine Liturgy, in which he exhaustively illustrates the various stages of the Orthodox service. Rosemary Edmonds, who translated Gogol’s pamphlet as The Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, believes that the essay was conceived in

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­ editations on the Divine Liturgy, Gogol would meticulously document the M physical actions of the priest leading up to the enactment of the Eucharist, noting specific vestments and hidden rites as signs of his spiritual purity: the priest, who has been “abstinent in body and spirit” (trezvit’sia telom i dukhom) since the evening before, carefully dons a series of sacred vestments (“so that nothing in his appearance is reminiscent of a man engaged in everyday worldly affairs”) before turning to the table of oblation (zhertvennik) on which the bread and wine will be prepared for the Divine Liturgy.13 In this context, Ivan Iakovlevich’s performance—his hungover concentration on his morning bread, his ceremonious attention to ritual—playfully travesty those of the Orthodox priest, and the result of his labors is this most unhallowed of hosts. The Eucharist represents one of the central mysteries of the Church. The miracle of bread-become-body celebrates the full evangelical plot of Christ’s life, from birth/incarnation through last supper/death.14 Just as Christ was the Word made flesh, the nose’s position within the bread emblematizes its parodic role as the incarnation, or physical embodiment, of the Logos. The equivalence of battered nose and embodied Word is reinforced with Ivan Iakovlevich’s first exclamation on probing the foreign object in his bread: “Plotnoe?” (Solid? [49]). Through a bit of Gogolian sound-play (plot/plot’), the barber’s ­unexpected word choice emphasizes the scene’s connection with the Eucharist and incarnation: particularly in connection with the sacramental bread, the word plot’, “flesh,” evokes the formula Slovo plot’ byst’ (And the Word became flesh), from the prologue of John’s gospel.15 His cry also carries echoes of the priest’s inspired performance during the ritual of transubstantiation. As described in Gogol’s Meditations, it is the priest’s words that bring about the transformation from Paris in 1845 (that is, just three years after the final revisions of “The Nose”), and revised shortly before Gogol’s death. See Rosemary Edmonds, translator’s preface to N. V. Gogol, The Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1960), xii. 13 N. V. Gogol, Razmyshleniia o Bozhestvennoi liturgii, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii N. V. Gogolia: S ego biografiei i primechaniiami, ed. A. I. Kirpichnikov, 3 vols. (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1902), 3:180. Here and below, orthography has been updated. 14 Vaiskopf, too, notes that both birth and crucifixion are reproduced in the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, and identifies the story’s opening scene, which he terms a “travesty of the Eucharist,” as the most profound layer of the narrative (Siuzhet Gogolia, 229). 15 Moeller-Sally also makes note of this pun (“0000,” 343).

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bread to flesh at the climax of the Orthodox liturgy, the communion: “the priest blesses [the holy bread and chalice], saying, ­‘Transmuting them by Thy Holy Spirit.’ Three times the deacon exclaims ‘Amen’—and the Body and Blood are already upon the altar: the transubstantiation has occurred! The Eternal Word [Vechnoe Slovo] has been called forth with a word [slovom]. The priest has accomplished the sacrifice using the Word [glagol] in stead of the sword.”16 As Susi Frank points out in her essay on the Meditations, during the communion ritual the words of the priest attain “a performative character, akin to the word of God itself.”17 In this context, Ivan’s shocked Plotnoe—a thinly veiled “let it be flesh”—casts him as a sort of ­carnival-priest, coaxing flesh from bread. Other details of the nose’s provenance support and amplify a Christological reading of “The Nose.” Following the nose’s emergence from the roll, the barber suggests wrapping it up and laying it in the corner (“Ia polozhu ego, zavernuvshi v triapku, v ugolok” [50]), in a sort of mockery of the Gospel nativity scene described in Luke 2:12: “This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”18 Vaiskopf takes this even further, seeing in Praskovia Osipovna and Ivan Iakovlevich a veiled c­ aricature of Mary and Joseph.19 Certainly, the sight of Praskovia Osipovna pulling the buns from her oven presents a uniquely Gogolian parody of delivery, and her later dig at her husband’s impotence slyly introduces the idea of a virgin conception: “All you know how to do is pull that razor of yours over the strop, but soon you’ll be in no condition to fulfill your duties.”20 This metaphor of childbirth as pulling bread from the oven has long roots in Slavic folklore, where the feminine, womb-like stove 16 “Благословив, произносит священник: Преложив Духом Твоим Святым; троекратно произносит диакон: аминь—и на престоле уже Тело и Кровь: пресуществленье совершилось! Словом вызвано Вечное Слово. Иерей, имея глагол наместо меча, совершил закланье” (Gogol, Razmyshleniia o Bozhenstvennoi liturgii, 3:201). 17 Susi Frank, “Negativity Turns Positive: Meditations upon the Divine Liturgy,” in Gogol: Exploring Absence, ed. Sven Spieker (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 1999), 89. 18 Additionally, as David Bethea has pointed out, the word vynos refers to the bearing out of a dead body; perhaps this coded nativity scene also points forward to Christ’s death (personal communication). 19 Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 232. 20 “Znai umeet tol’ko britvoi vozit’ po remniu, a dolga svoego skoro sovsem ne v sostoianii budet ispolniat’” (50).

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was thought to transform sick or premature babies into healthy children (just as unformed dough is transformed into crusty bread) in the folk ritual of “rebaking” (perepekanie).21 The desperate barber finally plunges the still-swaddled nose into the Neva in a grotesque imitation of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, with the surname-less “Ivan the barber” standing in for John the Baptist (Ioann Krestitel’). Since we subsequently see the nose clearly only in the Kazan Cathedral, the direct channel from water to church seems to present a near perfect parody of baptism as the cleansing path to the House of God. (In fact, the nose’s complete path of origin (stove—bread—river—cathedral) corresponds precisely to an outline of Christ’s earthly life, from womb to flesh, baptism to church ministry.) Given the considerable religious subtext of the work, it is only fitting that Kovalev should first confront his nose in church. His indignant ejaculation, ­however—“you should know your place. And suddenly I find you, and where? In a church!” (55)—highlights the incompatibility of profane flesh and sacred space (and on a fast day, no less)!22

“On the 25th of March”: The Annunciation According to Gogol Perhaps the most vital religious detail of the story relates to its opening on March 25, the date on which the barber Ivan Iakovlevich wakes up to discover another man’s nose lodged firmly in his bun. The date is ­recognizable to all Gogol lovers, and the fact that it corresponds to the Orthodox celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation has hardly been overlooked; indeed, one of the most scrutinized aspects of “The Nose” is its timeline. The thirteen-day gap between the nose’s departure and return corresponds precisely to the disparity between the Russian/Julian and Western/Gregorian calendars (twelve days plus one night)—in other words, the nose is lost and found over the course of a single night.23 Gogol 21 For more on the ritualized “baking” of children and its variations in folklife and folklore, see Tempest, “Stovelore in Russian Folklife,” 9–10. 22 No meat is allowed on the Orthodox Feast of the Annunciation. 23 Many interpreters ascribe the specific timeline to the motivating device of the dream, which Gogol had employed in earlier drafts. It was I. D. Yermakov who first linked dream and time, noting that the story’s title disguises its original title and true theme (son, or “dream”). See I. D. Yermakov, “The Nose,” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 173–74. In his fascinating

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composed the opening scene of “The Nose” in 1832, possibly under the influence of “noseology”—the fashion for literary treatments of the nose motif then popular in literary (and ­subliterary) sources. He produced the full first draft, intended for publication in The Moscow Observer between 1833 and 1834. The initiating event in these early drafts takes place on February 23, with no specific date set for the nose’s “return.” A revised version, the action of which takes place between April 25 and May 5/6, was published in Pushkin’s The Contemporary in 1836. In Gogol’s final revisions, prepared for inclusion in his 1842 collected works, the action takes place from March 25 through April 7.24 As Seifrid and Moeller-Sally have shown, successive versions of “The Nose” developed the story’s metaliterary elements in response to contemporary journal debates on n­ arrative form;25 similarly, the revisions contribute to an overall ­amplification of the work’s Christological themes. In particular, the shift in dates from draft to draft reveals Gogol’s lengthy quest for an ideal timeline for his story;26 as ­Vaiskopf notes, over the course of writing, Gogol gradually rearranged the story’s action to coincide with the Easter season, and specifically with the starting point of Jesus’s life, the Annunciation.27 These timeline revisions, along with the steady expansion of the work’s religious themes, clearly invite further inquiry into the central motif of the Annunciation. And so, the final version of “The Nose” pointedly begins on March 25 and, from the eponymous hero’s emergence from Ivan’s bread through its stubborn refusal to stick to Kovalev’s face, the nose’s escapades all take place over one day—in other words, the entire episode takes place over the course of the recent essay, Seifrid reads the chronological gap as an emblem of Russia’s peculiarly “belated” position in relation to the West. Each argument is discussed in further detail in the next section. 24 Publication history and dates taken from PSS, 3:649–56. For the variants of “The Nose,” see PSS, 3:380–400. 25 Seifrid, “Suspicion toward Narrative,” 382–96; Moeller-Sally, “0000,” 325–45. These recent readings by Seifrid and Moeller-Sally have persuasively demonstrated how successive drafts of “The Nose” built deeper and deeper subtextual strata, as Gogol began to respond to contemporary issues of narrative form and the condition of literary life. 26 O. G. Dilaktorskaia, too, takes the alterations in timeline over subsequent drafts as proof that Gogol was searching for a significant date (Fantasticheskoe v “Peterburgskikh povestiakh” N. V. Gogolia [Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo universiteta, 1986], 86). 27 Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 231.

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Annunciation Feast.28 But why would Gogol finally settle on this particular date, even shuffling the syntax of the opening sentence so that the very first words (“Marta 25 chisla”) would link the ensuing tale so definitively to this central mystery of Christianity, the incarnation of God’s Word on earth? While several scholars—including I. D. Ermakov, Peter Spycher, Laszlo Tikos, and Dilaktorskaia—have commented on the irony of the date, its spiritual s­ ignificance has yet to receive full analysis in the critical literature.29 This chapter explores the motif in more detail, suggesting that the travestied A ­ nnunciation scene presented in “The Nose” inverts the classical biblical ­hierarchy of the senses to climax, not in sexless incarnation but in carnal separation. In the Bible, the Annunciation is narrated in the book of Luke (1:26– 38), as well as certain apocryphal gospels. According to Luke’s gospel account, the angel Gabriel is sent to the Virgin Mary to announce that she is to become the mother of the Word of God Incarnate. Though the scene is enacted by angel and virgin, however, the focus is on the Word itself. Language performs various functions in the traditional evangelical 28 In addition, the story takes place on a Friday, a possible allusion to Good Friday and the beginning of the Easter holidays. According to Vaiskopf, this detail accords with the church tradition that the Annunciation really occurred on a Friday (Siuzhet Gogolia, 231). While Western liturgical calendars would move the feast of the Annunciation to avoid its ­coincidence with either Holy or Easter Week, the Orthodox Church never moves it, even when it falls on Good Friday or Pascha. This—in addition to the mandatory performance of the full Annunciation liturgy, regardless of where the holiday falls—emphasizes the feast day’s great significance to Orthodoxy. 29 The psychoanalyst Yermakov was the first to comment on the Annunciation connection, though he does not provide a comprehensive reading of the theme. He notes that the detail provides both a holy contrast to the work’s sexual (and otherwise unclean) themes, as well as a link to them, as the usually concealed (sex, impregnation) is openly celebrated on the Annunciation (“Nose,” 177–78). In his reading, this contrast between the concealment and revelation of sexuality lies at the heart of Gogol’s work. Spycher’s influential psychoanalytic reading likewise construes the date as a mordant contrast to the story’s absurdity. In his view, the virgin birth “shines as an ironic sun over the grotesque and sad landscape of ‘The Nose’” (Peter C. Spycher, “N. V. Gogol’s ‘The Nose’: A Satirical Comic Fantasy Born of an Impotence Complex,” Slavic and East European Journal 7, no. 4 [1963]: 370). Tikos fleshes the motif out more fully. In his reading, Gogol’s date “refers obliquely to the mystery of Christ’s birth,” thus underscoring the story’s central problem (the “sexless birth of a person ‘who is all on his own’”), by connecting it obliquely with the central mystery of Christianity, that of the incarnation (Tikos, “Petersburg Stories”). Dilaktorskaia associates March 25 more broadly with the fantastic, saying that the Feast of the Annunciation was a day of signs, superstition, and fortune telling (Fantasticheskoe, 90).

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account: Gabriel brings the Word of God, and Mary listens; in her initial confusion, she is troubled at his words (“smutisia ot slovesi ego” [1:29]); in his ­clarification, Gabriel explains that nothing (literally, “no word”) is impossible through God (“iako ne iznemozhet u Boga vsiak glagol” ­ [1:37]);30 Mary finally consents to his message (“budi Mne po glagolu tveomu” [1:38]), and the Word of God is planted within her. Thus, the conception of Christ—the transformation from Word to flesh, spirit to matter—is enabled through language: its expression, comprehension, and agency. To Christians, the incarnation of Christ represents the principal instance of God’s performative language since Genesis, and the most important act of the divine Logos in the New Testament. As the act ­initiating this ­transformative verbal act, the Annunciation represents a celebration of language, a feast to the power of the Word. Early Christian interpreters of the Virgin Conception traditionally emphasized Mary’s physical integrity, which led to the question of how, exactly, the Word might have entered and fertilized the virgin body.31 The Latin church fathers extended the acoustical metaphor offered by Luke’s account of the Annunciation, teaching that the Virgin had conceived through the right ear, a doctrine that became known as the conceptio per aurem.32 The third-century Christian theologian Origen proposed that Mary conceived the divine Logos on hearing the words of the angel Gabriel. He may have intended this as a ­metaphor for the “conception of wisdom in the soul by the power of the spirit,” but his trick of anatomical sublimation

30 Although the NRSV translates Luke 2:37 as “For nothing will be impossible with God,” the Douay-Rheims Bible, a very literal translation from the Latin Vulgate, renders it “Because no word shall be impossible with God,” putting the emphasis squarely on the divine Logos; the Russian preserves this literal meaning. 31 For more on the doctrinal intactness of the Virgin’s body, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 45, 73. See also Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in ­Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 156–57. 32 Leo Steinberg, “‘How shall this be?’ Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s ‘Annunciation’ in London, Part I,” Artibus et Historiae 8, no. 16 (1987): 27. For a list of Latin writers who employ the formula of conceptio per aurem, see Nicholas Constas, “‘The Ear of the Virginal Body’: The Poetics of Sound in the School of Proclus,” in Proclus of Constantinople: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 274n4.

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was understood literally.33 To early Christians of both the Western and Eastern Church, aural insemination offered an acceptable physical solution to the questions posed by virgin conception,34 and the myth would prove pervasive in popular legend. By the fourth century, the ear/womb connection had become both quasi-official and explicit: the story gained a veneer of authenticity through repetition by theologians, and the phrasing became ever more carnal.35 By late in that century, the trope had assumed both physical specificity and a frankly sexual character: St. Ephraem Syrus wrote, “today Mary through her ears received the champion of everlasting bliss,” while St. Gaudentius enthused that “None other was born of Mary than He who glides in through the ­motherly ear to fill the Virgin’s womb.”36 A century later, St. Eleutherius further e­ roticized the metaphor (“For here the ear was the wife, and the angelic word the husband”), while the ninth-century bishop Agobard mapped out the precise earthly path of Christ: “he enters our region through the ear of the Virgin, and exits through the golden gate.”37 This aural myth of ­conception, officially endorsed by the Church and exuberantly elaborated by the church fathers, was also popularly chronicled in a dozen songs and hymns from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. In her provocative study Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, twentieth-­ century historian and ­Mariologist Marina Warner uncovered two ancient songs that ritualize the myth: a sixth-­century Latin hymn, still sung to this day, as well as a ­thirteenth-century English dance that joyfully celebrates the event: “thru thine ear thou were with Child.”38 Steinberg includes a more explicit fourteenth-­century German song that asserts, “The message entered through her ear, and the Holy Ghost flew in with it, and so worked in her body that Christ became God and man.”39 In the formulation of feminist literary scholar Margaret Homans, the tradition by which Mary’s ear acts as a 33 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 37. 34 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 317. 35 Steinberg, “‘How shall this be?,’” 27. 36 Ibid., 27. 37 Ibid., 28. 38 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 37. 39 Steinberg, “‘How shall this be?,’” 31.

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vessel for the potent action of the Logos “articulates as directly as possible the power of god’s performative Word.”40 Some of the most famous interpreters of the Annunciation have been visual artists. According to the nineteenth-century art historian Anna Jameson, the Annunciation developed into the one of the most “profoundly felt and [. . .] beautifully handled” themes in Renaissance art, becoming a primary element in sacred representations by the thirteenth century.41 While various frescoes, i­lluminations, and engravings of the Annunciation depict particular moments from Luke’s account (Gabriel’s announcement; Mary’s reaction and fiat; the moment of incarnation), the artists did not necessarily confine themselves to the scene as narrated in the gospels; rather, the scriptural tales were embellished through the incorporation of traditional or apocryphal—though generally church-sanctioned—details of the event. 42 In contrast to the rather graphic writings of the church fathers, visual representations of the Annunciation tended to be somewhat more restrained in their depiction of the divine ­conception; according to Steinberg, “Annunciation scenes in which conception through the ear is indicated without equivocation are surprisingly rare.”43 One of the most overt visual renderings of the conceptio per aurem is undoubtedly the famous fifteenth-century stone carving at the Frauenkirche (Virgin’s Chapel) in Würzburg: in it, God breathes into a long tube, along which a m ­ iniature infant Jesus glides toward 44 Mary’s waiting ear. Even those visual ­representations which do not explicitly articulate the aural myth render it implicitly, however, through symbolic imagery: the Word of God is frequently signified by a beam of light (or a dove, or breath, or even words themselves), which descend from on high to touch Mary’s head—or, o­ ccasionally, her inclined ear. (Sometimes these stand-ins for the Holy Spirit operate ­simultaneously: in Simone Martini’s famous fourteenth-­century altarpiece, the illuminated letters of Gabriel’s 40 Homans, Bearing the Word, 159. 41 Anna Jameson, Legends of the Madonna (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 210. 42 Ibid., 209. 43 Steinberg, “‘How shall this be?,’” 32. 44 Albert C. Labriola, “The Bible and Iconography,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, ed. Michael Lieb et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 195. For more on the iconography of Annunciation, see ibid., 193–96. For a representative collection of Annunciation images, see Julia Hasting, Annunciation (London: Phaidon Press, 2000).

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proclamation stretch from the mouth of the kneeling angel to the right ear of the startled virgin, while a dove descends from heaven, aiming directly at the same point). In keeping with evangelical and popular tradition, these paintings emphasize the various functions of language in the scene: traditional iconography concentrates on the action of spoken language, often featuring the actual words of Gabriel and Mary. Two of the best-known fifteenth-­ century ­paintings of the Annunciation, by Fra Angelico and Jan van Eyck, highlight the verbal exchange between Angel and Virgin; in each, Mary cocks her ear to receive the divine Word borne down by Gabriel, while the words of her own assent hang in the air before her lips, the bright letters painted upside-down so that they may be read by God above. Many Annunciation paintings from the Italian Renaissance depict Mary either kneeling in prayer or reading the Bible, which lies open to Isaiah’s prophesy of the virgin birth; the privileging of the auditory over the textual can be seen as she turns from her open prayer book to listen to the angel Gabriel, whose words will convey the divine Word directly into her.45 As Nicholas Constas, scholar of Eastern Christianity, writes in his comprehensive study of fifth-century Byzantine Archbishop Proclus of Constantinople, the trope of conception through Mary’s ear inspired Latin, Syrian, and B ­ yzantine writers from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, and by the fifth century, the doctrine of conceptio per aurem had achieved “normative status” throughout Christianity.46 While it would continue to flourish in the Western Church well into the modern age, however,47 the doctrine was questioned in the medieval 45 Homans, Bearing the Word, 158; Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, 310n20. This fascinating detail—Mary’s shift in attention from the written to the spoken word, from the eye to the ear—would certainly have spoken to Gogol, who esteemed the oral, “living” word (the slovo zhivo, as Gogol enthused about Zhukovskii’s translation of the Odyssey [Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 298]) over written language. For more on the verbal vs. the visual and the privileging of orality in Gogol’s fiction, see Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 181–213. 46 Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, 274. 47 In fact, the ancient fantasy of aural insemination is still a productive and inspiring one; in his 1931 lyric “The Mother of God,” W. B. Yeats imagines “The three-fold terror of love; a fallen flare / Through the hollow of an ear; / Wings beating about the room; / The terror of all terrors that I bore / The Heavens in my womb.” The striking first image of a star tumbling through the labyrinth of an ear was inspired by visual art of the Annunciation; as the poet revealed in a note, “the words ‘a fallen flare through the hollow of an ear’ are, I am told obscure. I had in memory Byzantine mosaic pictures of the Annunciation, which show a line drawn from a star to the ear of the Virgin. She received the Word through the ear, a star fell,

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Fig. 3  Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1433–34. Tempera on panel, 175 x 180 cm. Museo Diocesano, Cortona. Source: Wikimedia Commons. period by a few prominent Orthodox theologians.48 Twelfth-­century ­theologian Michael Glykas, for example, relocates the organ of acceptance from the passive, hearing ear of the Virgin to her own speaking mouth; by shifting agency from the received Logos of God to the creative power of Mary’s own word, he argues that it was Mary’s verbal assent that initiated her divine “overshadowing.”49 Although the Virgin’s ear would increasingly become something of a vestigial organ in Eastern theology, the poetic mingling of sound and conception would continue to be strongly felt in Byzantine culture, in songs, sermons, poems, and hymns celebrating the Annunciation.50 In Russian Orthodoxy, too, while the and a star was born.” See A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984), 299, note on line 1. 48 Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, 295, 305–6. 49 Ibid., 305. 50 Ibid., 307.

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doctrine of conceptio per aurem was not as ­boisterously developed as in the West, the tradition continued to live on in popular and artistic representations—in fact, just those forms Gogol was most likely to be familiar with; as Gippius points out, Gogol’s knowledge of the Orthodox and other Christian traditions was not so much doctrinal as aesthetic, focusing primarily on art and architecture, ritual, and the senses.51 The basic c­ ompositional structure of the Orthodox icon of the Annunciation is the same as that of its Western counterparts— indeed, European representations were largely patterned on Byzantine models (though they grew more personal and idiosyncratic after around the thirteenth century). Gabriel approaches Mary on the viewer’s left, with a wide, “running” stance; Mary sits or stands before him, her head inclined toward the approaching angel. Though the iconography includes no overt signifiers of the aural doctrine—no tubes conveying God’s breath into the Virgin’s ear, no ­shimmering letters streaming from Gabriel’s mouth into Mary’s waiting orifice—it is clear that the depiction of the Blessed Mother was influenced by the tradition: a ­stylized ray of light and a dove fall from heaven to touch Mary’s head, as in Western portrayals of the event; she leans forward, her ear upturned as though to accept the descending Logos.52 Ultimately, then, both Eastern and Western art traditions follow evangelical accounts of the Annunciation in placing emphasis, either directly or obliquely, on the spoken word, with the virgin ear acting as a channel for God’s verbal grace. In light of this rich theological and artistic tradition, it is no surprise that the idea of the Annunciation would continue to hold poetic power in the art of the modern age as well; offering a direct link between word and birth, the event has provided many writers with a fruitful metaphor for the creative process. Pushkin, for instance, alternately drew on and travestied the motif of 51 See Gippius, Gogol, 97. 52 It is worth noting that in all traditional iconographic representations of the Theotokos, the ear or ears of the Virgin peek out from beneath her robes, clearly visible to the viewer; in the Annunciation icon pattern of the Stroganov Podlinnik—an illustrated manual for ikonopistsy, describing how each saint or other iconic figure must be depicted—the Virgin inclines her head as beams of light reach toward her exposed ear. It is conceivable that this conventional element of Marian iconography (even beyond the Annunciation) functions to emphasize her identity as a listener (and bearer of God’s Logos). See Christopher P. Kelley, ed. and trans., An Iconographer’s Patternbook: The Stroganov Tradition (Torrance, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1992), 259.

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Fig. 4 Icon of the Annunciation from the Church of St. Climent, Ohrid, R.o.Macedonia, first quarter of the fourteenth century. Egg tempera on wood. National Museum, Ohrid, Macedonia. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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the Annunciation in his poetic work: although the direct biblical source is Isaiah, the lyric “The Prophet” employs traditional Annunciation imagery (an angel touching the ears of the poet) to depict poetic inspiration while The Gavriiliad blasphemously reconfigures the Gospel story of the Virgin ­Conception. Gogol, too, would undoubtedly have been familiar with both traditional and poetic accounts of the Annunciation. As an educated Orthodox Christian who had been raised in a household suffused with an “atmosphere of religious ritual,” Gogol would have been well acquainted with the canonical versions;53 his scholarly interest in medieval history and ­European art is likely to have ­introduced him to the popular Renaissance representations;54 and he was certainly aware of the poetic works ­incorporating the subject, including those of his idol, Pushkin.55 His artistic attraction to the Annunciation—its feast day as well as its themes of orality and incarnation—is unmistakable in the P ­ etersburg cycle: the penultimate entry of “Notes of a Madman,” just prior to the diarist’s final linguistic ­breakdown, also falls on the 25th (apparently of March, as February—or “Февуарий”—has just ended). The stutterer Akakii A ­ kakievich was born on March 23, just a few days short of the Annunciation. And the final fragment traditionally included in the Petersburg cycle, “Rome,”56 features a heroine of transcendent beauty named Annuntsiata. Gogol describes her as “the sun, absolute beauty,” and “lightning, and not a woman”: it seems that, in ­accordance with her divine name, she was intended to unite spirit and flesh. 53 Gippius, Gogol, 15. Gogol’s interest in Orthodox spirituality truly blossomed in the years following his publication of “The Nose,” when he wrote three works that are, as Maguire ­characterizes them, “largely spiritual and specifically Christian in orientation”: Meditations on the Divine Liturgy and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends were both conceived in 1845, while An Author’s Confession dates from 1847. See Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 83. 54 Although Gogol would visit Rome for the first time only in 1837, his literary works of this earlier period display a fascination with Italian religious art; in both “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Portrait” he compares Italian and Russian art, applauding the greater spiritual a­ wareness of the Italian artist. 55 Although Pushkin’s blasphemous Gavriiliad was not published until much later, it was widely circulated between its composition, in 1821, and 1828, when Pushkin was p­ resumably forced to admit authorship to Tsar Nicholas I. It is reasonable to assume that by 1842, Gogol would have been familiar with both this scandalous work and with “The Prophet,” which also appeared in 1828. 56 Originally conceived as a novel titled Annuntsiata.

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As the act initiating the incarnation of Christ—the moment when the Word became flesh, representing the supreme resolution of body and spirit, material and divine—the Annunciation holds a vital position in Christian theology. The feast is, in essence, a celebration of the divine Word—a c­ onnection preserved in both the Latin Annuntiatio and the Russian Blagoveshchenie (from the verb veshchati, “to speak or announce”). In setting his own tale of fleshly dislocation—and “dislocution”—on this feast to the union of body and soul, Gogol poses a spiritual conundrum. The tale begins when Ivan Iakovlevich wakes up and senses—or, more literally, hears—the scent of hot bread: “uslyshal zapakh goriachego khleba” (49).57 At the same moment, in another part of town, the barber’s alter ego Kovalev awakens without a nose.58 This, then, is Gogol’s take on the Annunciation, the moment when the act of hearing leads to miraculous conception. In place of a holy incarnation, though, we have the opposite: not an addition but a subtraction; and not a transformation from divine Word into man but a transposition of flesh into bread. Gogol confounds the link still further as the barber’s wife Praskovia Osipovna orders her husband to get rid of the nose, “chtoby ia dukhu ego ne slykhala!” (50). While the idiom is a c­ olloquial reference to smell (don’t let me catch a whiff of him!), taken literally, it conveys something far less mundane: “so that I don’t hear the spirit!”59 Her words present an explicit negation of the central act of the Annunciation: the hearing and acceptance of the Spirit (or Word). This coarse exclamation sets up the story’s subsequent undoing of the gospel tale, presenting a farce of 57 Of course, this is a common colloquial use of the verb uslyshat’, meaning “to sense.” Still, given the charged Annunciation context surrounding this opening scene on March 25, the primary meaning of the verb (to hear) is hard to ignore. 58 As James Woodward has shown, the names Kovalev and Iakovlev(ich) are near anagrams. See James B. Woodward, The Symbolic Art of Gogol: Essays on His Short Fiction (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1981), 77. In fact, as one of my undergraduate students pointed out, the barber’s patronymic practically proclaims “I am Kovalev” (Ia—Kov[a]lev)! 59 While Praskovia Osipovna’s slykhat’ (like the narrator’s uslyshat’) might be a common colloquialism, its position—and repetition—at the beginning of a story that is largely “about” the dislocation and misuse of a sense organ would seem to invite further investigation. In fact, her idiosyncratic formulation (chtoby ia dukhu ego ne slykhala!) is a combination of two more conventional idioms: “chtob dukhu ego zdes’ ne bylo!” ([I wish] that there were no trace of him [none of his spirit] here) and “chtob ia ego bol’she ne slykhala” (Don’t let me catch even the sound of him again). There is also the unmistakable whiff of folklore, as though the expression were a modern-day relative of Baba Yaga’s hair-raising announcement, “Fu-fu! Russkim dukhom pakhnet!” (I smell a Russian smell [lit: spirit]).

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the holy mystery commemorated on the feast day: in place of an embodied Word, the supreme resolution of spirit and flesh, Gogol conceives a terrifying rending of flesh from flesh, spirit from matter.

“. . .”: Finding the Word in “The Nose” This brief review of traditional and canonical accounts reveals the Annunciation as a celebration of the Word itself: heralded by the angel Gabriel, perceived and received by Mary, and ultimately embodied in the Virginal womb, the divine Logos performs the narrative’s principal act of creation. In popular ­representations, the Word of God and the ear of the Virgin perform in tandem, the active agent and passive recipient of the Annunciation scene, climaxing in the crucial act of Incarnation. And within this subtext, by extension, Kovalev’s sundered member represents the embodied Word: on the morning of March 25, the Nose is swathed and baked in Praskovia Osipovna’s dough, “heard” by the ear of her husband, and “delivered” from its tender casing in a grotesque simulation of the Annunciation story, in which the divine Word is perceived, enfleshed, carried, and delivered by the Mother of God.60 The scene—and the resulting being—is fundamentally unholy: a parody of the Word made flesh in the body of the Virgin. (Of course, in Petersburg—unholy city of an unholy creator—such a grotesquely embodied Word is only to be expected.) And so, against the work’s well-developed Christian backdrop, and particularly with the spotlight fixed so firmly on the scene of the Annunciation, the question of the Word and its function is cast into high relief. And indeed, embedded in the opening passage—alongside the half-buried references to ­incarnation, blood, Eucharist, and resurrection—comes the first hint about the role of language in the text: Ivan Iakovlevich’s surname has gone missing, a detail that suggests the very Gogolian theme of the loss of language. Though veiled, this theme is well elaborated throughout the work, on the individual, societal, and narrative levels. In effect, “The Nose” enacts a sort of lampooned liturgy of the 60 Fittingly, Praskovia’s patronymic marks her as the daughter of Joseph; as the spouse of the “hearer” (and the baffled bystander to the “miracle”), the barber’s wife plays a very Josephlike role in the Nose’s genesis. Her metaphorical association with both mother and father of this breaded “Christ” renders Ivan Iakovlevich entirely irrelevant, developing the motifs of both the barber’s implied impotence and (in a very Gogolian way) the virgin birth.

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Annunciation: in place of a celebration of the integral, embodied word, the narrative will proceed to chronicle its severance, escape, and ultimate failure. If the nose represents the logos, then its loss entails the loss of linguistic function. At first glance, Kovalev seems a surprisingly articulate Gogol ­character—at least in comparison to his other Petersburg counterparts like the unintelligible Akakii or the word-garbling Poprishchin. In fact, however, Kovalev appears to lose the ability to speak along with his nose. His eventual verbal deterioration should come as no surprise, though: after all, his vocal entrance into the text consists of mere sound—the formal features of language, devoid of meaningful content: “brr” (52). Early on, the narrator illustrates the verbal facility with women that Kovalev had enjoyed prior to his accidental ­amputation: “Listen, honey,” he used to say whenever he met a woman selling shirt fronts in the street, “come on over to my place; my apartment’s on Sadovaia; just ask, ‘Where does Major Kovalev live?’—anyone will show you” (53). The Major’s confident invitation asserts the power of both word and status at once. In direct contrast to his fluent flirtations, the noseless Major is rendered incapable of even addressing the girl in the cathedral: after hearing the rustle of a woman’s dress and glimpsing a white chin and rosy cheek beneath a hat, Kovalev primps his collar, straightens his seals, and steps forward—only to leap back when “he realized that in place of a nose he had absolutely nothing” (57). When he does speak, he struggles to articulate his desires. During his first encounter with his fugitive nose, Kovalev’s words repeatedly vanish, leaving trails of ellipses in their place or dissolving into body language: “You can judge for yourself . . . I don’t know, my dear sir . . . (at this, Major Kovalev shrugged his shoulders) . . . Excuse me, but . . . if one looks at this from the point of view of duty and honor . . . you yourself can understand . . .” (56). Even the nose itself, so recently a part of Kovalev, cannot understand his disjointed words: “Pardon me, but I cannot grasp what it is you are trying to say. Explain yourself more clearly” (56). Later in the newspaper office, Kovalev is again rendered wordless when he attempts to recount his absurd story: “I ask . . .,” he begins twice, trailing off both times. When asked for his name, he demurs: “No, why the name? I can’t tell you that” (60). His refusal (or incapacity) to name himself renders him, in effect, as anonymous as his barber; devoid of both speech and name, Kovalev is now reduced to rank alone (a not uncommon state in Gogolian Petersburg, as we will learn in “The Overcoat”).

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In fact, the theme of language and naming in “The Nose” is tightly ­intertwined with that of rank. Early on, the narrator divulges that Kovalev’s rank—collegiate assessor, or the eighth rung on the imperial ladder of civil ranks—was purchased in the Caucasus: “Collegiate Assessors who obtain that title through academic diplomas cannot in any way be compared with those Collegiate Assessors who are made in the Caucasus. They are two entirely different species [. . .] Kovalev was a Caucasian Collegiate Assessor” (53). One notch above Akakii’s eternal titular councilor, the rank of collegiate assessor was the first that entitled its holder to hereditary nobility. After procuring this coveted, and wholly unmerited, place in the Table of Ranks, Kovalev moved to the imperial capital to make his name, where he again retitled himself according to the corresponding military rank: “in order to lend himself more nobility and weight, he never referred to himself as Collegiate Assessor, but always as ‘Major’” (53). By shifting his title to the military equivalent, Kovalev has ensured that he will be known by surname alone (Major Kovalev), rather than by name and patronymic (Platon Kuzmich), which was customary at his level of the civil service. Richard Gregg has explored the motif of the name in “The Nose,” tracing what he calls the “onomastic shortcomings” of the three central characters.61 In his treatment of Kovalev, Gregg points out that the names Platon and Kuzma were more commonly bestowed among the lower classes, and would have labeled the hero a “commoner by birth.”62 In effect, Kovalev’s social and onomastic maneuverings have cut him off from his past (plebeian Christian name, association with lowborn father and humble origins), and opened up a promising new future, consisting of hereditary rank and family name alone. This striving nonentity has, in effect, taken control of Petersburg’s sign system in order to construct for himself a new identity. As we will see, however, the hero’s unearned acquisition of rank (and heritable nobility), crowned by a shady appropriation of military status, has rendered his entire social standing rather rickety; indeed, the loss of a single object seems to be enough to bring it all toppling down. The ensuing story details the chipping away of Kovalev’s assumed identity, as the loss of nose leads to the loss of face, language, and name, in turn; the 61 Richard Gregg, “À la Recherche du Nez Perdu: An Inquiry into the Genealogical and Onomastic Origins of ‘The Nose,’” Russian Review 40, no. 4 (1981): 371. 62 Ibid., 372.

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consternation of the typically self-assured Major betrays his anxiety that these deficiencies will expose his imposture, further endangering his social status. This species of social striver understands the nexus of power in St. Petersburg, where name, status, and sex are all intertwined; the loss of any one entails the loss of all associated privileges and pleasures. Kovalev is aware that his status is linked to sex and social connections, and his amorous ambitions are endangered by the loss of his member: “Major Kovalev was not against getting married, but only in the event that the bride came with a fortune of two hundred thousand. And therefore the reader may judge for himself the state of this Major when he saw, in place of a rather presentable and moderate-sized nose, a most ridiculous, flat, and smooth place” (54). In essence, Gogol’s tale includes two accounts of sense organs standing in for something else. For Mary, the ear is a spiritual stand-in for the vagina; its acquiescence ensures the safe passage of God’s Word to the virgin womb, where it will become incarnate in human flesh. For Kovalev (as Ermakov and the psychoanalysts have long contended), the nose is, on one level, a proxy for his own sexual organ. Its disappearance keeps him from spreading his own word—or anything else, for that matter: the words of the formerly smooth-talking Major deteriorate along with his flesh, and he experiences his loss of language (and nose) as an impediment to his social and sexual climbing. In fact, however, the disintegration of flesh and the birth of a grotesque new being signify something far more serious: the fundamental irreconcilability of body and spirit.63 The deft social maneuvers performed by Kovalev—and later, in exaggerated form, by his own nose—delineate the traditional sign system of Petersburg, a closed world in which social status is expressed emblematically, through the acquisition of medals and mustaches, as well as linguistically, in the appropriation 63 A straightforward reading of “The Nose” would likely rely, for the sake of clarity, on a single interpretation of the title character: the nose represents a penis, or Kovalev’s social ambitions, or the charade of status in imperial Petersburg. My own reading—perhaps forsaking clarity for comprehensiveness—has identified the nose with both spirit (profane embodiment of the divine Word) and flesh (phallic symbol). These two interpretations should not be seen as contradictory, however, particularly in Gogol’s abundant textual world of “both . . . and,” where symbols can be as manifold, and even inconsistent, as the narrative voice. Indeed, in Peter’s bureaucratic order, penis and word are entwined: twin emblems of masculine authority; in this sense the nose, in all its rich multivalency, becomes yet another instance of the Petersburg profanation of the divine.

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of name and rank. All of Gogol’s Petersburg tales are awash in a sea of male power symbols, struggling for supremacy: coal-black whiskers assert their ascendancy over ginger ones on “Nevsky Prospect,” while “The Nose” opens with a confrontation between the unshaven, unbuttoned, and hatless Ivan Iakovlevich and his arresting officer in broad sidewhiskers, sword, and tricorn hat. The semiotics of Peter’s power structure is thus clearly defined: appearance is equivalent to identity, and one’s word (name, title) becomes reality. The slippery relationship between sign (black whiskers; tricorn hat) and referent (foreign office; military rank) however, leaves some room for play: in “The Nose,” rank may be purchased as easily as opium, and names discarded as effortlessly as an old dressing gown. The sign system can be manipulated, rendering social identity unstable, reinventable; in this town, a nose in a mundir (uniform) has a stature equivalent to that of a state councilor. This absurd state of affairs, in which the sound of one’s name or the shape of his buttons determines his worth, befits a capital once called into existence by imperial decree and now defined entirely by its own brilliant exterior. At one end of the Petersburg naming spectrum lies Ivan Iakovlevich, whose loss of family name, and resulting downgrade to name and patronymic alone (whether by choice or by accident), relegates him to the lowest level of the imperial social order.64 And at the other end, Collegiate Assessor Platon Kuzmich attempts to control the signifying system to call forth a new, more aristocratic gentleman: Major Kovalev.65 This metamorphosis from Platon Kuzmich to Major Kovalev represents yet another instance of the “little man” seizing control of Peter the Great’s own Word—the Petersburg signifying system—similar to Evgenii’s curse in The Bronze Horseman or Germann’s attempt to get his hands on the top card in “The Queen of Spades.” As we have seen in those other Petersburg narratives, however, in Peter’s city, the tsar himself always struggles to maintain dominion over his linguistic order: Evgenii is chased back into silence and submission, the 64 Ibid., 372. 65 The fact that the “barber Ivan Iakovlevich” is unnecessarily introduced twice in the opening line (on either side of the parenthetical report of his missing surname) draws attention not only to his imperfect onomastic condition, but to its opposition to his counterpart Major Kovalev, who has purposely reduced his existence to last name alone; together, they form a single, integral individual.

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gibbering Germann locked away in an asylum. Kovalev’s onomastic crime— the theft of a title that he has not earned—is punished with the dissolution of his shaky, stolen public image; the absconding nose—which is equated with the Word incarnate—represents a warning against such verbal creation by a mere upstart in Peter’s city. And meanwhile, as though crisscrossing the Major’s downward trajectory, the Nose gains a name (“Gospodin Nosov,” Mr. Nose [60]) at the very moment that Kovalev loses his. Later, the Nose will be apprehended while attempting to flee the city with a passport made out in a new name (66).66 Interestingly, while Kovalev was rendered speechless by his ­noselessness, unable to tell either his name or his story, the Nose appropriates multiple identities and spawns competing versions of his own tale: just as the newly minted “gentleman” secures a name (and social position) for himself, rumors of his whereabouts begin to spread. And, as always in Gogol, these multiplying reports generate their own enhancements: “Meanwhile rumors about this remarkable incident spread throughout the capital and, as usual, not without certain embellishments” (71). Words beget more words, c­ orresponding to the archetypal Petersburg theme: the agency of language to create new realities. This flight of the nose (word) from its proper place befits the atmosphere of the city as a whole, where the dislocation of word from referent has become commonplace: at the newspaper office, for instance, notices advertise “a solid droshky lacking a spring” and a “young, spirited dapple-grey horse, seventeen years old” (59); the professed soundness and youth of these items is clearly at odds with their actual condition. The failure of the word to reflect or convey reality extends to the narrative level of “The Nose,” as well. Some of the most sensitive recent scholarship examines the story’s metanarrative search for a discourse adequate to its social and artistic needs: Moeller-Sally and Seifrid each interpret the story as a response to literary issues under debate during Gogol’s time. Seifrid interprets the text and its titular hero as an embodiment of Gogol’s anxieties about producing a meaningful autonomous discourse, given Russia’s uncertain historical 66 The nose’s theft (or at least its rapid assumption) of a new identity makes it a mirror of his owner, who has crafted his own social standing out of the same raw material (language, rank, and badges). The new state councilor/Nose thus seems to serve as both an emblem of Kovalev’s “base” social-climbing side and a liberated embodiment of his lost “spiritual” side (to be discussed in more detail shortly).

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“place.” By slipping his story into the calendrical gap caused by Peter’s incomplete Westernization, Gogol marks his narrative as a comment on the post-Petrine crisis of national identity.67 Moeller-Sally reads the story as Gogol’s contribution to the contemporary debate over the state of literary life in the age of Osip Senkovsky and the commercialization of literature. He touches on the motif of Annunciation, with its climactic union of spirit and matter, reading it primarily as a symbol of the literary situation confronting Gogol and his contemporaries: how to reconcile spiritual or intellectual ideals with the material values embodied by the ­commercial press and its audience.68 Indeed, the story serves to examine the very act of storytelling, as various narrative forms are appraised and discarded: prayer, journalism, personal ad, letter, rumor, and anecdote are all tried on and cast off in turn; as Seifrid explains, Kovalev’s quest leads him to confront all the “principal forms of discourse abroad in the Nikolaevan age.”69 In the end, the epilogue provides space for the narrator’s musings on narrative and the limits of narration: “Such is the story that took place in the northern capital of our vast empire! Only now, upon much reflection, can we see that there is a great deal that is implausible in it” (75). In keeping with the story’s theme of verbal failure, even the storyteller loses his words by the end, trailing off six times in the story’s final paragraphs, and leaving his tale to fade into its own fog of fragments and ellipses. It appears that in Gogol’s Petersburg (as in Peter’s capital), the ultimate symbol of authority is the word itself—the trick, of course, lies in maintaining control over it.

“Plot’ slovo byst’”: Flesh Was Made Word And so, while Kovalev has surrendered both his nose and his control over language, his gallivanting Nose has been shown to represent—on the biblical level, at least—a parody of the Word incarnate. And this unlikely link between nose and word extends beyond the subtextual strata into the narrative and metanarrative levels of meaning. In his landmark 1921 study, Soviet scholar V. V. Vinogradov traced the inspiration for Gogol’s story back to the era’s taste for the “noseological.” He assembles and analyzes various elaborations of the 67 Seifrid, “Suspicion toward Narrative,” 382–96. 68 Moeller-Sally, “0000,” 339–44. 69 According to Seifrid, Kovalev’s failure to identify a discourse “adequate to his tale” echoes the predicament of literary culture of the time (“Suspicion toward Narrative,” 391).

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theme in both literary and nonliterary sources of the 1820s and 1830s, rooting around for the seeds of Gogol’s own tale.70 In his examples, culled primarily from Russian sources, noses demonstrate qualities familiar to any reader of “The Nose.” They are independent and alive: “it [the nose] is just as alive as I am myself,” proclaims an awed innkeeper’s wife from the Russian translation of Tristram Shandy,71 the work which Vinogradov claims stimulated Russian interest in the nose motif. They are held up as the body part that most reliably represents the whole: “After the eyes, the most important part of the face is the nose, which, through the distinctiveness of its appearance, is always the best indicator of the general nature of one’s education.”72 They are commonly ­associated with thought: “for many [the nose] is an obvious seat of ideas, for when no more can be taken from the head then one will ordinarily put a finger on his nose, from which plentiful fruits follow.”73 And most interestingly, the nose is conventionally linked to the faculty and quality of speech: “O nose . . . you bellow out the vices of the man who wears you . . . your clues are silent, but eloquent.”74 This relationship between nose and speech is further elaborated by K. F. Gref, who writes with distaste about the unfortunate noseless who “lose even the clarity of their voice,” and whose “appearance and pronunciation of words evoke disgust and horror.” Gogol himself had intended his “special tale” (as he termed it in a February 1835 letter to Pogodin)75 for publication in The Moscow Observer), launched in 1835 with the express purpose of combating Senkovsky’s Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia), a lowbrow journal which was popularly (and commercially) beloved, if critically despised. Stepan Shevyrev’s lead article in 70 V. V. Vinogradov, “Naturalisticheskii grotesk: Siuzhet i kompozitsiia povesti Gogolia ‘Nos,’” in Evoliutsiia Russkogo naturalizma: Gogol’ i Dostoevskii (Leningrad: Academia, 1929), 7–88. 71 “On [nos] tak zhe zhiv, kak ia sama zhiva,” from the Russian translation of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in ibid., 10. For more on “Shandyism” as a literary phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see ibid., 8–13. 72 From A. Nikitin’s translation from the German of K. F. Gref ’s Rinoplastika (Rhinoplastik), in ibid., 23. 73 From the Russian translation of the humorous poem “Pokhvala nosu” (In Praise of the Nose), which appeared in the popular journal Rumor (Molva) in 1831. Quoted in ibid., 14. 74 “O nos ... ty vopiesh’ o porokakh togo cheloveka, kotoryi tebia nosit! Tvoi uliki bezmolvny, no krasnorechivy,” from Karlgof ’s 1832 “Panegirik nosu,” in ibid., 15; Gref, Rinoplastika, quoted in ibid., 23. 75 PSS, 10:352.

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the first issue of The Moscow Observer, titled “Literature and Commerce,” ­examines the conflict between the spiritual concerns of art and the material values of contemporary society,76 exploiting the interchangeability of the concepts “baked” and “printed” (pechenoe/pechatannoe)—already familiar from the discussion of literary consumption in “Nevsky Prospect”—to describe the production of commercial journalism at the time: “the printers’ sheets grow fat, and the book itself rises like a roll.”77 In “The Nose,” Gogol elaborates this trope more fully, lacing a constellation of pek- roots through the narrative (where repeated references to bread, pancakes, pastries, etc., alternate with those of printing), creating a cluster of images uniting bread with the printed word. In one typical exchange in the newspaper office, Kovalev tries to persuade a reluctant clerk to run his ad for the missing nose by revealing his face, naked and incomplete; when the awed clerk beholds its empty center, as smooth as a “freshly baked pancake,” the exasperated Kovalev retorts that it would be ­impossible not to print it (62, my emphases):  В самом деле, чрезвычайно странно!—сказал чиновник,— место совершенно гладкое, как будто бы только что выпеченный блин. Да, до невероятности ровное!  Ну, вы и теперь будете спорить? Вы видите сами, что нельзя не напечатать. Within this web of allusions blending baked goods and published matter, the nose’s emergence from a newly baked roll subtly smacks of its equivalence to the printed word. Seifrid also reads Gogol’s tale as a union of “nose imagery with reflections on literary power” (and even a possible direct rebuke to that caterer to commoners, Senkovsky).78 He points to a recent satirical allegory by Senkovsky in which the narrator attempted to lift Pushkin’s literary reputation up by the nose (za nos) as well as the 1832 sketch Satan’s Grand Procession 76 Moeller-Sally, “0000,” 341. 77 Ibid., 343. Moeller-Sally convincingly demonstrates how Gogol adopted the terms of Shevyrev’s article over the course of revising “The Nose,” turning his story into a response to the issues raised by Shevyrev. Gogol, of course, had employed the printing-is-baking, reading-is-eating metaphor in his own artistic texts, most recently in “Nevsky Prospect,” in which the vulgarian Pirogov feeds indiscriminately on pirozhki and the daily paper, to his evident physical satisfaction. 78 Seifrid, “Suspicion toward Narrative,” 392.

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(Bol’shoi vykhod u Satany), in which Satan devours books in place of rolls. The narrator muses that the devil eats printed things, where we eat baked things (“U nas oni pechenye, a tam pechatannye!”).79 Against this literary backdrop (and particularly given the demonic associations of Petersburg), Ivan ­Iakovlevich’s exclamation on finding the nose in his own roll (“for bread is a baked thing, and a nose is something else entirely”) suggests that, in this ­metaliterary world, if the roll is a baked thing, the nose must be the “printed thing.”80

“You should know your place”: Whole vs. Parts As the previous sections have established, Gogol’s Nose is strongly linked with the word through various associations, religious (Nose as a carnival Christ, the Word incarnate), literary and metaliterary (the noseology circulating around this time; its association with bread/print and its role in the contemporary journal debates), and textual (Kovalev’s loss of language and name along with his nose). The Gogolian nose, however, is a substantial and complicated object, stuffed with various, seemingly contradictory, meanings. In addition to the word, as Vinogradov’s exhaustive catalogue proves, noses are strongly a­ ssociated with their carriers’ honor (among many other, less savory, characteristics): one poet claims that “the nose is a badge of honor worn on the face,” while another instructs, “The nose is personified honor, attached to a person.”81 The nasal and the spiritual were likewise linked in the popular philosophy of Gogol’s time, which commonly read extraphysical qualities into the structure of the human face. The enormously influential physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater claimed, for instance, that the physical, moral and intellectual elements of a 79 See ibid., 393, for more on Gogol’s potential polemic with Senkovsky. 80 “ibo khleb—delo pechenoe, a nos sovsem ne to” (50). Gogol had playfully probed this relationship between noses and literary authority in the famous scene from “Nevsky Prospect” in which the cobbler Hoffmann prepares to cut off the nose of the tinsmith Schiller. In Russian, of course, all Germans (even mock-Romantic poets) are nemye, dumb; might the removal of the nose, in Gogol’s fictional universe, somehow be connected to their “muteness”? This correlation (loss of nose/loss of language) fits nicely into the larger picture associating nose imagery with literary power. Seifrid’s findings suggest that this union of nasal and verbal power was a basic component of the nose-heavy atmosphere of Gogol’s time. 81 From “Pokhvala nosu,” in Vinogradov, “Naturalisticheskii grotesk,” 14; and Karlgof, ­“Panegirik nosu,” in ibid., 15.

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man’s life could be read in the composition of his features: the higher intellectual life of a man was expressed in his forehead and skull; his animalistic characteristics were held in the mouth and chin; and his moral, spiritual life could be read in the outline of his nose and cheeks.82 The association of noses and virtue has its basis, perhaps, in the nose’s role as a sort of moral barometer, its color and condition advertising its holder’s use (or abuse) of alcohol, tobacco, and sex. Disfiguring lesions on the nose were an unmistakable announcement of syphilis, for instance.83 In fact, the text of “The Nose” is replete with signs that the disease has left its mark on the faces of the city’s sinful: on his way into the cathedral, the noseless Major must pass through a row of beggar women “with bandaged faces and only two slits for the eyes” (55), whom he does not mock as he once would have; once inside, he ­inadvertently compares himself to “Some old woman selling peeled oranges on Voskresensky [Resurrection] Bridge [. . .] without a nose” (56). Could K ­ ovalev’s pimple be an early warning of punishment for his sexual profligacy, rendering him the equal of these defaced women? In the fragment comprising the story’s initial draft, Gogol presents the nose as just such a gauge of his hero’s fondness for sensual indulgence: “He could not have been mistaken. The nose was heavy, with delicate, just barely perceptible tender little veins, for the C ­ ollegiate Assessor loved to drink a glass of good wine after dinner.”84 It is conceivable that this correlation between the rhinal and the moral has its foundation in the Bible, where life sprang from the union of nose and spirit: when God created man, he “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). In this sacred context, the nose assumes spiritual value, as the conduit for the life-giving pneuma of God. It seems ­especially meaningful, then, that the Petersburg nose is linked rather with sin and status. This blasphemous reversal—the substitution of body for soul—is to 82 See Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomy, or, The Corresponding Analogy between the Conformation of the Features, and the Ruling Passions of the Mind, trans. Samuel Shaw (Oxford University, 1827), 30, http://books.google.com/books?id=PyQAAAAAQAAJ. Iurii Mann (Poetika Gogolia: Variatsii k teme [Moscow, Coda, 1996], 121) and Vaiskopf,(Siuzhet Gogolia, 318, 228) also address Lavater and the then-fashionable correlation of nose and spirit. 83 The nose would have provided particularly useful evidence in Petersburg, which, according to Toporov, led Russia in the incidence of venereal diseases in the nineteenth century (PTRL, 32–33). 84 PSS 3:381, from the initial draft of “The Nose.”

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be expected in Peter’s infernal city, where the pursuit of social, mental, and above all physical pleasures (snuff, style, status, and sex) have supplanted the spiritual strivings of Orthodox Moscow. The association of the Petersburg nose with sin—gluttony, sensuality, and pride—is consistent with interpreting the Nose as a parodic Word: both readings highlight the antispiritual qualities of Kovalev’s escaped appendage (as well as the sorry spiritual state of his adopted city). Indeed, in “The Nose,” the organ’s ancient association with the divine is at once preserved and debased. The link between nose and spirit is metaphorized and parodied in the olfactory function, which we have already seen in the commingling of scent, flesh, and soul in the story’s opening scene. Kovalev’s later attempts to stick his nose back on present a neat parody of the original life-inspiring scene of Genesis: “He brought it to his mouth, warmed it a little with his breath, and again brought it to the smooth place between his two cheeks; but in no way would the nose stay on” (68). Here, in a reverse of the biblical fusion of flesh and spirit, Kovalev’s breath on the nose fails to inspire spiritual—or even physical—cohesion. Where God once breathed life through the nose of mankind, whom he had created “in his image” (Gen. 1:27), the artist Gogol—who would later write that he conceived of man as a representative of the image of God— performs his own rather perverse act of creation, breathing life into a nose itself. How do the author’s own creatures—a faceless Nose in uniform; a bureaucrat with an empty space for a nose—accord with this Christian conception of man’s god-likeness? Annensky, whose meditation on the eyes and nose as emblems of man’s divided spiritual/fleshly nature opened this chapter, is hardly the only scholar to have discerned on the faces and features of Gogol’s characters the play of the material and the sacred. As Sergei Bocharov notes in his remarkable essay “Around ‘The Nose,’” Gogol frequently represented the human face, paying close attention to physical details and deformities of the flesh.85 The scholar directs his critical lens toward the figure of the nose itself, measuring its physical weight as well as its spiritual value, before shifting focus to Gogol’s renderings of the human face. In his comprehensive analysis of Gogol’s work, Bocharov reads the face as the “locus of human dignity,”86 a 85 Bocharov, “Around ‘the Nose,’” 21. 86 Ibid., 27.

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battleground upon which God and the Devil wage war.87 (This motif seems to be a common one in Orthodox theology; the early twentieth-century theologian P. A. Florensky likewise locates the face as the focal point of the struggle between Spirit and matter.)88 As Vaiskopf first noted, the apostle Paul draws a portrait of the body’s willful disintegration in his first letter to the Corinthians that is strikingly ­reminiscent of Gogol’s deformations of the flesh in his fiction.89 Equating the Church with the body of Christ, Paul elaborates the opposition of physical wholeness vs. fragmentation to illustrate his notion of worshipers unified within the body of Christ: Indeed, the body does not consist of one member, but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? (1 Cor. 12:14–17). Paul employs a corporeal metaphor in which the unity of parts of the human face and body represents the communion of the faithful within the Church; its disintegration corresponds to the Church’s dissolution.90 This biblical motif of 87 Ibid., 23. 88 Cited in ibid., 28–29. See P. A. Florenskii, “Ikonostas,” Bogoslovskie trudy, no. 9 (1972): 91–92. 89 Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 228. 90 As one perceptive reviewer of this chapter has noted, it is possible that Gogol’s admonition against fragmentation had roots not only in broad Christian theology but also in an ­emergent strand of specifically Russian thought: the concept of sobornost’, exalting the spiritual community of traditional Slavic society over Western-style individualism, was developing in the Moscow salons of the 1830s among Aleksei Khomiakov and other major ideologists of the Slavophile movement. Though Gogol was presumably unfamiliar with the term sobornost’, he was most certainly influenced by the emerging Slavophile ideal of Orthodox unity as theorized by his friend Khomiakov, who allegorized the unity of the Church as “‘the unity of many members in a living body’” (A. S. Khomiakov, “Tserkov’ odna,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. [Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900–1904], 2:1–26, in Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992], 192n24). For more on sobornost’ in Gogol’s

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physical integrity is manifest in the central event of “The Nose”; the first meeting between Kovalev and his own escaped body part in the Kazan Cathedral allows Gogol to complete the metaphor, highlighting the dissolution of the Church (the body of Christ) in imperial Russian society. The conspicuous emptiness of the cathedral during the high holy Feast of the Annunciation, during which members of the civil service were required by law to attend mass,91 attests to the absence of “spirit”: “Not many people were praying in the church; they all stood just inside the entrance” (55). Given the association between the Feast of the Annunciation and the figure of Mary, it seems appropriate that Kovalev should first encounter his nose in the Kazan Cathedral, which is dedicated to the Our Lady of Kazan icon (Kazanskaia ikona Bozhiei Materi).92 The icon, perhaps the most venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church, depicts Mary and child; the Holy Mother’s upturned ear, peaking as always from beneath her robes, draws attention to her essential role as listener and instrument of the divine Logos.93 The presence of this revered image of the Virgin Mother, her head inclined toward the baby Jesus—the impossible union of flesh and spirit—draws out the irony of the present disunity between Kovalev and his own flesh. The Orthodox liturgy on the Feast of the Annunciation venerates Mary and her vital role in this prologue to the Incarnation. The service celebrates the reception of the divine Word, featuring a pair of dialogues that plot its path writings, see the introduction of N. V. Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, trans. Jess Zeldin (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), xvi–xviii. For more on Khomiakov’s doctrine of sobornost’ and its later elaboration by Kireevsky and other Slavophile philosophers, see A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii, On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader, ed. and trans. Boris Jakim and Robert Bird (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1998). 91 According to Dilaktorskaia, in Gogol’s time the Annunciation was an official holiday, during which members of the civil service were obliged to attend service; instead, of course, they are parading around Nevsky Prospect! 92 The icon, in fact, has a storied relationship with Peter’s city; as Toporov relates, in 1682 the prelate Mitrofan Voronezhskii prophesied to Peter, “You are erecting a great city in honor of St. Peter the Apostle. This will be the new capital. God blesses you for it. The Kazan icon will be a protection [pokrov] for the city and all your people. As long as the Kazan icon is in the capital, and the Orthodox stand before it, no enemy foot will enter the city” (PTRL, 51–52). 93 By Gogol’s time, the Our Lady of Kazan icon had achieved enormous popularity, and there were several copies in circulation throughout the empire. Although there is disagreement over the fate of the original wonderworking icon, many sources report that it had moved to Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral in 1821, replacing an earlier copy, in order to commemorate Napoleon’s defeat.

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from heaven to womb: in the first, the archangel Gabriel convinces the Virgin Mary that the Word he conveys is from God; in the second, the Virgin must convince her betrothed husband, Joseph, of the same. Perhaps in keeping with the day’s Marian overtones, Gogol accentuates the presence of women in the Kazan Cathedral scene. Kovalev passes the throng of bandaged beggar women and compares himself to the female fruit vendor; he tries to persuade the Nose to take his rightful “place,” by informing him of specific female acquaintances (“moreover, being acquainted with ladies of many good houses: Chekhtareva, the wife of a State Councilor, and others”); but he is ultimately distracted from his purpose by a young lady who enters the church with her mother: “At that moment, the pleasant rustle of a woman’s dress was heard; an elderly lady bedecked in lace approached, accompanied by a slim girl in a white dress that prettily showed off her slender waist and a pale yellow hat as light as pastry” (56). The focus on women throughout the church scene amplifies the feminine atmosphere of the church, implicitly drawing attention to Mary’s function in Christianity (and specifically in the Annunciation): to hear and bear the Word of God.94 Throughout the scene, Gogol seems to inventory the body parts of the women populating the church: the exposed eyes of the beggar women; the nose of the orange seller; the white chin, the brow brushed by “half-­transparent” fingers, and “part of a cheek” of the young girl. This enumeration of facial features ultimately adds up to a sort of sensory inversion of the original Annunciation scene, assembling every part of the face except for those ­ ­responsible for the production and perception of the Word: the mouth and the ear. The result is an emphasis on the sexual at the expense of the feast’s ­traditional association with the spirit.

“If I had only lost my ears”: A Hierarchy of Senses For Gogol, it seems, the spiritual status of man is perceptible in the face: in the harmony of its features or in their dislocation. His artistic deformation of the human face reflects the loss (or degradation) of associated qualities: i­ntellectual, spiritual, and the like. How, specifically, is the flesh distorted in “The Nose,” and 94 This focus on the feminine especially conspicuous in this most masculine of cities; as Toporov observes, women made up only 30 percent of the city’s population in 1837 (PTRL, 32).

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what does its defacement signify? The most obvious example, of course, lies in the loss of Kovalev’s nose: his face’s lack of a central feature, and the “ridiculous, flat, and smooth place” (54) that occupies its position. According to the ­noseological literary and biblical context, the imbalance in Kovalev’s ­appearance might suggest an absence of spiritual characteristics: virtue, morality, or integrity. In addition to the secession of the nose, though, Gogol insinuates the failure of assorted other parts: over the course of the story, the various senses of perception founder dozens of times. The most obviously hindered, of course, is that of smell: Kovalev is unable to smell the stale air (ne mog slyshat’ zapakha) of the newspaper office, for instance, “because he had covered his face with a handkerchief, and because his nose itself was God knows where” (60). In ­addition, eyes frequently fill with tears that blur the vision; they play tricks on their bearers (the policeman “at first took [the Nose] for a gentleman” [66]); they are rubbed or wiped in disbelief; they are screwed up or narrowed to correct perception; they cloud over with fog and go all topsy-turvy with shock (“At this extraordinary spectacle, everything seemed to turn upside down before his eyes” [54]); they are nearsighted and require glasses; and they are insulted with papers and even words (the newspaper clerk “tosses notices into the eyes of old women and porters" [60], and the Inspector’s remark that respectable men’s noses do not disappear stings Kovalev “ne v brov’, a priamo v glaz” [lit: not in the brow, but right in the eye] [64]). The faculty of speech is also targeted; characters’ articulatory equipment comes under assault, in addition to their narrative powers: they bite and compress their lips in displeasure; Kovalev loses his metaphorical “tongue” from happiness (“Radost’ otniala u nego iazyk” [66]); and following the return of the nose, the barber is forced to lodge a foul-smelling finger against Kovalev’s gums to shave his face: “although it was quite inconvenient and difficult for him to shave without holding on to the smelling part of the body, by somehow planting his rough thumb against the cheek and lower gum, he finally overcame all obstacles and shaved him” (74). This final maneuver—displaying Kovalev’s willingness to sacrifice his mouth in order to protect his newly restored nose—physically encapsulates the hierarchy of senses in the story. But the most degraded of the senses is that of hearing. In “The Nose,” ears are no longer used for hearing; rather, they seem to be there solely for scratching

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and shaving. Ivan Iakovlevich scratches behind his ear when trying to decide whether or not he was drunk the night before; shortly thereafter, we learn how he also likes to lather his customers’ faces “Under the nose and behind the ear” (51) or wherever else he fancies. The only other mention of ears comes with Kovalev’s tortured cry, “My God! My God! Why this misfortune? If I had lost an arm or a leg, it would have been better. If I had only lost my ears [bud’ ia bez ushei]—that would be disagreeable, but still more bearable [snosnee]” (64). The unusual comparative form “snosnee” suggests that “being earless, while disagreeable, is at least ‘more with-nose.’”95 Kovalev’s little pun deftly reasserts the hierarchy of senses: far better to be without ears than without a nose. Indeed, the nose has all but taken over the function of the ear: over the course of the story, as we have seen, it “hears” the scent of baking bread, stale air, and even “souls” themselves. In light of the work’s Christological ­implications— and especially within the specific context of the Annunciation-marked opening—these apparently idiomatic expressions grow in significance: if the ear’s duty at the Annunciation is to receive the Holy Spirit, here the “spirit” is never even perceived by the usurped auditory sense. The denigration of the ear at the expense of the other organs may be further observed in the number of references made to each. The nose, not surprisingly, leads the pack with an even one hundred mentions. The eyes follow with thirteen appearances, and the mouth (counting everything, from lips to gums) is close behind with eleven. The lowly ear, by contrast, receives only three mentions—and these three, as we have seen, focus either on the physical organ itself (without mention of its proper function), or on its desired absence. It appears that, in the world of “The Nose,” the “wrong” organ—the nose, with its connotations of sex and snuff—is worshiped, while the “right” senses are diminished. Critics have noted that Kovalev is constantly focusing on the wrong things: the women in church, rather than his absconding nose; the nose’s rank, rather than its absurd autonomy. At the very heart of this motif lies ­Kovalev’s obsession with the nose, both his own and everyone else’s. His increasing fixation on the escaped member forms the very basis of the story, of course; even when “nosed,” though, the Major displays an obsession with the 95 Such root play (nes-/nos-) is typical of Gogol’s joyful, inventive wordplay. See Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 199–213, for more examples of Gogol’s verbal games.

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olfactory. Immediately on waking, even before he knows that his nose is gone, he calls for a mirror in order to inspect a new pimple on it. Later, following its reinstatement, Kovalev admires it constantly in mirrors, smugly compares it with other soldiers’ button-sized noses, and stuffs it full of snuff in front of ladies. His single-minded focus stands out against his disdain for the other parts (for example, his wish that his ears could take the place of his lost nose, or his preference for the barber’s smelly fingers jammed against his gums rather than the tip of his recovered nose). Kovalev’s misguided reverence for his nose stands for Petersburg society’s own, generalized, misdirected focus on the nose (body, pleasure), rather than the ear (word, spirit). Gogol himself exhibited quite a literary fixation on the nose and its functions. As Ermakov points out, one could compile “a whole little anthology from the passages in Gogol’s works that mention the nose, so tirelessly does he describe the taking of snuff, nose-blowing, and so on.”96 Indeed, Gogol’s characters are constantly flipping open decorated snuffboxes, stuffing their nostrils full of snuff, and sneezing out great clouds of it. In “The Nose,” the titular nose seems to be the only main character who isn’t continually filling his nostrils with snuff: Ivan Iakovlevich takes a pinch immediately before lathering his customers (51); the newspaper clerk snorts it three times over the course of his short conversation with Kovalev; and the Major himself ­ostentatiously packs his newly restored nostrils full of it: “He spoke with [the women] for a very long time and, deliberately taking out his snuffbox, spent a particularly long time in front of them packing his nose from both entrances” (74). The taking and sharing of snuff underpins the competitive bureaucratic structure of Gogol’s Petersburg; it constitutes a ceremonial act of status ­affirmation in which the noseless Kovalev can no longer participate, much to his humiliation.97 His exclusion from this bonding ritual—a sign of his   96 Yermakov, “Nose,” 163.   97 By Gogol’s time, snuff had become strongly associated with the regimented hierarchies established in the previous century, a link that was reinforced by the eighteenth-century tradition of bestowing ornamental snuffboxes—decorated with famous military or government portraits—on subjects who had earned the special notice of the tsar. In Gogol’s fiction, snuff is primarily enjoyed by the petty officials and characters on the margins of society who endeavor to entrench themselves more securely in the system by “inscribing themselves into a bygone traditional world.” See Konstantine Klioutchkine, “‘I Smoke, Therefore I Think’: Tobacco as Liberation in Russian Nineteenth-Century Literature and

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e­ limination not only from his own rank but from the very rungs of hierarchy— is profoundly disturbing, as evidenced by his vexed response to the witless newspaper clerk: “Can you not see that I precisely lack what’s needed for a pinch of snuff? Devil take your snuff! I cannot stand the sight of it now, not only your vile Berezinsky, but even if you were to offer me rappee itself ” (63). And beyond its role as social cement, snuff also fulfills an important personal ­function, as an agent of sensual pleasure: each sniff of ground tobacco delivers a powerful sense of physical gratification, frequently followed by a sneeze (whose energetic jouissance rivals the erotic release of orgasm) and an increase in nasal discharge. There is certainly something darkly sexual in Kovalev’s final scene, in which he stands before Podtochina and her daughter, exultantly packing both nostrils full of snuff while muttering about his disinclination to marry the daughter. His purposeful and exhibitionistic act of physical stimulation, aimed squarely at pleasurable release—and particularly in the vigorously asserted absence of a female partner—is unmistakably masturbatory.98 Whether intentionally phallic or not, the nose is certainly associated with the pleasures and sensations of the body: snuff, sex, sneezes. The singular attention St. Petersburgers shower on the nose results in a dangerous imbalance: a society that so worships the nose exhibits a fixation on physical pleasures at the expense of metaphysical ones. Within the religious and literary network of Gogol’s Petersburg, the noseless Major—and his grotesque, animated Nose itself—emblematize flesh without spirit, an overemphasis on the physical, with a terrible blank space in place of the soul. In Kovalev’s case, as two different characters take pains to point out, the blank space takes the form of a pancake—a detail which, particularly given the timeframe of the story, calls to mind ­Maslenitsa. This “butter festival” is the Orthodox equivalent to Carnival: a period of revelry and indulgence preceding the abstinence and piety of the Lenten season. Kovalev’s permanent pancake symbolizes the eternal carnival atmosphere of Petersburg: all the flesh, without its balance in spirit. Read in this Culture, in Tobacco in Russian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks (New York: Routledge, 2009), 85–87.   98 Maguire ties Gogol’s legion of sneezers and snuff takers to the long tradition of noses as “surrogate penises,” a practice familiar to Russian audiences through the publication of ­Tristram Shandy; he likewise reads snuff taking as a stand-in for masturbation. See Exploring Gogol, 185.

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context, Ivan Iakovlevich’s observation (just before the mock Eucharist) that it is “absolutely impossible to ask for two things at once” (49) heralds the ­physical/spiritual divide at the heart of the story.99 The impossibility of “both at once” serves as Gogol’s own announcement of the irresolvability of flesh and spirit, his own Annunciation of the anti-incarnation about to take place on Voznesensky Prospect. The barber’s half-dead condition (ni zhiv ni mertv) when he recognizes the nose becomes an emblem for the state of spiritual deadness in Peter’s capital: who here is spiritually alive?100

“Concealed in fog”: The Dis-integrated city This oddly bloodless battle of body and soul that plays out across the ­fragmented features of Gogol’s hero simultaneously plays out on a larger scale over the ­fragmented face of Petersburg. We have seen how the temporal boundaries of the story, massaged to slip precisely inside the fictional space between two calendrical systems, have been extensively (and variously) interpreted. The geographical boundaries of the narrative are equally clearly marked, though the specific physical context of the story has not received nearly the degree of ­scholarly attention as its timeline. Plotting a rough map of the urban ­topography of “The Nose” illustrates how the architectural and geographical features of St. Petersburg play an essential (if hidden) role in the story; Gogol’s physical ­selection and arrangement of the city space reflects values and social pressures specific to Peter’s imperial, bureaucratic capital. Ivan Iakovlevich’s barbershop is located on Voznesensky Prospect, one of three grand avenues radiating from the Admiralty. In the opening pages of the story, Ivan Iakovlevich’s urgency to get rid of the nose leads him straight down   99 His musings on the sad impossibility of both bread and coffee also read as a comic diminution of the famous line opening the final chapter of “The Queen of Spades” (“Two fixed ideas cannot coexist in the moral world, just as two bodies cannot occupy one and the same space in the physical world”). Pushkin’s adage, I have suggested, reflected the author’s preoccupation with the rise of Petersburg and the decline of Moscow; Gogol’s implies the irreconcilability of body and spirit in the adolescent imperial capital. 100 Petersburg is the capital of Peter’s hierarchy, where pen pushers are arrayed down the rungs of the Table of Ranks, from chancellor to collegiate registrar, like soldiers, from general to ensign; it makes a certain sense that such an analogous ranking of the senses—with sensual noses at the top and perceptive ears at the bottom—would be instituted here.

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Voznesensky to the Neva. His path from the shop to the river describes one side of an acute triangle originating at the Admiralty; Nevsky Prospect, the most famous of the radials running from the admiralty embankment, makes up the other side of the tale’s central angle. As the artery that feeds the historic heart of the city, Nevsky plays a major role in “The Nose” (as in all of Gogol’s Petersburg tales): this is where high society parades and gossips; where Kovalev himself likes to see and be seen, at least until his unfortunate anatomical dislocation; where he encounters—and is rejected by—his higher-ranking nose; where the fantastic appendage is rumored to stroll every day at three o’clock, and where the Major returns to his social climbing immediately following its mysterious restoration. Clearly, Nevsky is tightly associated with rank and status, and these themes play out primarily on that Prospect. In fact, it appears that the two opposing flanks of the triangle traced by the narrative represent the two social extremes of Petersburg society: the lowborn tradesman Ivan Iakovlevich, his shop sign advertising his nameless, presumably peasant origins,101 exists on Voznesensky, while the aristocracy promenades along its rival, Nevsky. ­Voznesensky is also explicitly linked with religion: the name of the street refers to the ascension of Christ, and the story’s religious motifs—however ­parodically presented—are all grouped there. By contrast, Nevsky has a negative c­ onnection to the Church: its vast cathedral stands empty, even on a feast day, while welldressed society women pour down its length like “a whole flowery w ­ aterfall [. . .] from the Police Bridge to the Anichkov Bridge” (57). Kovalev’s home is on Sadovaia Street, which links the two radial avenues and forms the “base” of the tale’s textual triangle. As the connection between the city’s two major Prospects (as well as the Major’s two prospects), Sadovaia represents the range of those values deemed “negative” in Petersburg (lowborn, peasant, religious) to those considered “positive” (status, office, wealth). According to the story’s socio-geographical underpinnings, the Major is ­positioned at the center of these two social extremes: he is, as we have seen in our discussion of names, a born commoner; he aspires, however, to a higher status and has successfully perverted the Petersburg sign system toward that goal. Every day, we learn, he rides to Nevsky to promenade among the elite; his 101 Although many peasants belonged to the meshchanstvo (an urban class of artisans and other townspeople, akin to the petite bourgeoisie), I assume that Ivan Iakovlevich, as Kovalev’s alter ego, had the same class origins as the pseudo-Major.

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movement along Sadovaia represents a progression along the continuum of social status, from lowest to highest. The deep structure of “The Nose,” then, charts the hero’s attempt to progress—according to the semiotics developed within the story—along the all-important axis of status from the plebeian Voznesensky to the patrician Nevsky; his daily journey from one to the other represents his attempt to shed those traits marked as “negative” in the eyes of society. This “topographical” reading of the story is rooted in the architectural history of the imperial capital itself. A brief overview of the early planning history of the city reveals the significance behind the specific geographical contours of “The Nose.” The founding and planning of Petersburg represented a symbolic act of tsarist will, the superimposition of a blueprint for a new historical direction onto a marginal space of the Russian Empire. From the beginning, Petersburg was a city of fragments, its “face” naturally broken into three pieces which were divided from one another by the two main branches of the Neva. Although Peter I had originally intended to center his new capital around the Strelka (the tip or “arrow”) of Vasilievsky Island, by the nineteenth century the focal point had naturally shifted across the river to the mainland embankment. The young city thus had two centers: the old administrative center, as decreed by Peter, and the Admiralty district, to which political power and commercial activity naturally migrated as the city developed. The natural fragmentation of the topography was reinforced by Peter’s early planning efforts: the tsar not only built the city by imperial decree but populated it as well, issuing a series of early edicts commanding members of the gentry, merchant, and artisan classes to relocate to the new capital. His ukases reveal a preoccupation with settling each separate stratum of the populace into its own section of the emerging city: shipbuilders and craftsmen to Admiralty Island, tradesmen to the Petersburg district, and state officials to Vasilievsky.102 The city’s uneven early development, along with its apparently planned social divisions, found reflection in the layout of the various regions: the broad streets of the Admiralty district and the grid of Vasilievsky contrasted with the narrow, unplanned streets of the P ­ etersburg Side.103 In addition, by the late eighteenth century, three 102 See Eric Dluhosch, translator’s introduction to Iurii Alekseevich Egorov, The Architectural Planning of St. Petersburg (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1969), xx–xxii. 103 Egorov, Architectural Planning of St. Petersburg, 46–47.

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principal—but disconnected—architectural ensembles had emerged: the Winter Palace along the Palace Embankment, the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Petersburg Side, and the Strelka of Vasilievsky Island. In short, the Petersburg inherited from the eighteenth century was fragmented, both ­ spatially and socially, and architects and planners were forced to seek some harmonizing strategy for the city’s eclectic features in order to unify the countenance of the imperial capital. The major planning and reconstruction projects of the first half of the nineteenth century aimed to impose a coherent visual unity onto the city’s disparate parts; as historian Iurii Egorov notes, “The history of the various attempts to solve these architectural and spatial contradictions is in essence the history of the planning of St. Petersburg.”104 Early attempts to achieve aesthetic harmony among the city’s pieces included the construction of a unified façade along the Neva waterfront and the planning of a famous “trident” of radial streets (Voznesensky, Gorokhovaia, Nevsky), running from the Admiralty building all the way to the outskirts.105 These radial streets formally signaled the significance of the Admiralty and, as the century turned, the building—which had fallen into disrepair—became the structural center of the district that had emerged as the center of the city.106 Peter the Great himself had laid the foundation for the Admiralty shipyards in 1704; he drew up plans for the building’s foundation, which was to be shaped like a giant letter “П” for Пётр/Peter—as though the tsar were inscribing himself in the very architecture of the city center. A 1737 commission on the development of Petersburg declared that “no obstacle to the view of the ­Admiralty spire shall be permitted”; a century later, in response to the city’s need for a primary focal point, the renovation of the Admiralty logically became the first major architectural act of the new era.107 Between 1806 and 1823, the architect Andrei Zakharov undertook a massive reconstruction of the A ­ dmiralty, retaining the founder’s original floor plan while replacing the earlier tower with a more commanding profile and taller spire. The project created a strongly 104 105 106 107

Ibid., 40. Ibid., 60, 108. Ibid., 37. The original Admiralty was rebuilt by Korobov in the 1730s, and again by Zakharov in the first quarter of the nineteenth century; both architects preserved the tsar’s original design. Quoted in D. O. Shvidkovsky, Russian Architecture and the West (New Haven: Yale ­University Press, 2007), 208.

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articulated architectural center for the cityscape.108 The extensively reconstructed Admiralty became the first of the giant structures of Petersburg’s central “parade ground,” its monumentality and upward thrust reflecting the new imperial drive of the state.109 This colossal new edifice effectively r­ecentered the “face” of Petersburg, decisively orienting the city toward its dazzling spire and drawing the eye toward the Petrine heart of the new capital.110 By constructing his own story on the famous triangle of avenues whose apex converges at the city’s central, unifying feature, Gogol has given his literary capital something of its own face, with the thrusting spire acting as the the “Nose” of Petersburg itself. The Admiralty was intended to play a harmonizing role in the architectural history of Petersburg, imposing unity on the city’s disparate islands and ­ensembles, and composing an impression of wholeness out of independent parts. The boxy П that formed its foundation ensured that Peter’s potent s­ ignifier would forever reign over the city’s hub, holding the spokes of state in place. Additionally, the adjacent Falconet statue of Peter I—another artistic expression of the creator’s achievement—had been dedicated in 1782. Besides organizing the physiognomy of the city, then, the dazzling reconstruction of the Admiralty also contributed to the reorientation of Petersburg toward the ­ultimate symbol of Peter, the Bronze Horseman. Rather than truly integrate the city’s unrelated parts, however, the towering spire merely compelled the gaze toward it, deflecting attention from the geological and architectural divisions below. What’s more, as Egorov explains, opening up space around the ­Admiralty (by demolishing the walls of the original building) exposed the lack of architectural coherence between it and the surrounding buildings; in place of unity, that is, the project revealed the city’s fundamental fragmentation.111 Indeed, as Buckler has shown, an overall aesthetic of eclecticism prevailed in Petersburg from its origins through Gogol’s time in the capital. Certainly, the author’s own literary portrait of the city is constructed largely from images of 108 Egorov, Architectural Planning of St. Petersburg, 120. 109 W. Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 108. 110 Perhaps, in the years just preceding the ascendancy of the Natural School in Russia, with its tradition of scrutinizing individual physiognomy and urban physiology, it would not have been out of the ordinary to perceive and read the “face” of a city. 111 Egorov, Architectural Planning of St. Petersburg, 129–30.

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disorder and fragmentation; if the dawn-to-dark narrative tour of the city’s central street in “Nevsky Prospect” exposed the city’s temporal and socio-­ economic segmentation, “The Nose” reveals its topographical disunity, with the mists between sections breaking up the cityscape, in addition to the narrative. Petersburg, then, remained a city of parts—which, rather than being ­properly integrated, were forcibly united through their orientation toward two central monuments to Peter, one sculptural and one structural. The urban ­fragmentation of Petersburg echoes the facial deterioration of the hero Kovalev, whose independent nose exposes his face as no more than a conglomeration of individual, unequal features. The disjointed visages of city and citizen alike recall once again the biblical ideal of the body as integrated whole, rather than a collection of individual, separatist parts: “that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another” (1 Cor. 12:25). The excessive sovereignty of the individual within the Church is vividly metaphorized by Paul as the violent partitioning of the flesh. In the ostentatiously fragmented city of Petersburg—emblematized by Gogol in the disintegrating flesh of its inhabitants—this biblical offense of individual agency and self-promotion seems to have been both legitimized and institutionalized. Perhaps this reverence for the individual act of self-aggrandizement should not be surprising in Peter’s city, an imperial capital arrayed around its sovereign founder’s name and image. By planting his transcendent signifier at the head of the city’s rigid grid, Peter keeps a tight grip on his “order.” In his capital, the classes are segregated both physically (in different neighborhoods of the city) and temporally (occupying the central avenues at different times of the day); civil servants are branded by title and separated by rung on the Table of Ranks. “The Nose” documents Kovalev’s endeavors to manipulate Peter’s system, both linguistically (by appropriating a superior rank and name) and geographically (by orienting himself toward Nevsky). He has crossed all boundaries—of rank, name, and topography—originally set in place by the tsar. We have already seen how the hero’s misuse of the imperial sign system has resulted in a tenuous existence: the bogus Major Kovalev—the former (and rightful) Titular ­ ­Counselor Platon Kuzmich—now exists in name only. Could his similar exploitation of the empire’s spatial system—purchasing rank in the Caucasus, moving to Petersburg from the provinces, and masquerading as a gentleman

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along Nevsky—have resulted in his particular physical bifurcation? The ­fragmentation of self achieved by his acquisition of a new identity is literalized by Gogol in the physical doubling of his flesh, the creation of a new being that is both self (as Kovalev explains to the newspaper clerk, placing an ad “about my own nose” is “almost about me myself ” [61]) and not-self (as the nose proudly rejoins in the cathedral, “I am my own person” [Ia sam po sebe (56)]). Perhaps the olfactory breakaway at the heart of the tale represents the punishment (even if only in the anxious dreams of the newly minted Major) for the gross misappropriation of Peter’s Word—that is, the titles, badges, and other pieces of the imperial sign system established by the tsar. As we have seen in The Bronze Horseman, the ultimate crime in Petersburg is the little man’s appropriation of Peter’s Word, followed swiftly by the wrathful tsar’s vengeance. The removal and promotion of the nose could be an imperial warning, meant to remind that the collegiate assessor’s new identity—Major Kovalev—is paperthin, and just as easily torn. And in fact, the Major is not the only character in the story punished for pocketing symbols of status; the officer who apprehends Ivan Iakovlevich for his role in the disappearance of the nose accuses him of collecting something equally significant—if ridiculous—within the city’s signifying system: “I’ve long suspected him of drunkenness and theft, and just two days ago he pilfered a set of buttons from a shop” (66). Buttons might seem trivial, but in Gogol’s bureaucratic grotesque, where the right mundir can beget a state councilor, even the right-shaped button might establish one’s worth. And the text implies that Ivan Iakovlevich is collecting something more substantial than just “buttons”; certainly, noses and buttons are highly correlated, and even confused, throughout the story: Ivan Iakovlevich, hurrying to get rid of the olfactory evidence, is described as missing three buttons (51); Kovalev’s missing nose assesses his former owner according to his buttons (“Judging by the buttons on your uniform, you must serve in a different department” [56]); the narrator is baffled by the disappearance of the nose, as compared with, say, a button (“If it had only been a button that vanished” [65]); and finally, the renosed Kovalev gazes imperiously at a soldier with a tiny button nose (“He joyfully turned around and, with a satirical look, somewhat squinting an eye, looked at two soldiers, one of whom had a nose no bigger than a waistcoat button” [74]). Whatever he’s stealing, his theft appears to represent another attempt by a peasant to “break in” to the tightly monitored grid of status. If so, then Ivan

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Iakovlevich appears as a mirror image of his client Kovalev, ­scavenging unearned pieces of Peter’s sign system (whether buttons, noses, or titles) in order to re-create and build a name for himself.112 The name Iakov ( Jacob) means “he who supplants”; perhaps the button-or-nose-apprehending barber (whose own coat, we are told, was buttonless) is looking to usurp a new identity of his own, just as Kovalev before him (and as the newly freed nose itself is about to do).

“Are there not incongruities everywhere?”: Disintegration of Self, Society, Speech “The Nose” may have started as a joke (its early version consists only of the buffoonish barber making his scandalous discovery), but it gradually ­developed into a nuanced story with deep metanarrative and Christian subtexts. With each successive draft, Gogol added richer subtextual strata to the story’s ­religious underpinnings: Ivan’s “meaningful expression” before his morning roll heightened the solemnity of his mock Eucharist ritual; his startled cry of plotnoe! at the appearance of the nose—in place of the original kholodnoe!— strengthened the association with the Incarnation, firmly linking the nose with the Word incarnate; and most importantly, the revised dates firmly fixed the centrality of the Annunciation theme. The Feast of the Annunciation, during which the plot of “The Nose” unfolds, commemorates the Logos-centric initiation of the Incarnation. The holy festival held great spiritual and artistic meaning for Gogol, who referred to it over and over again in his fiction. Here, though, we get a mockery of the hallowed scene, signaling the irreconcilability of flesh and word in this venal, fragmented city of Peter. Indeed, by the time Kovalev visits the newspaper office, the holy Blagoveshchenie (Annunciation) has been reduced to an ­unprintable ob”iavlenie (announcement); in place of the leavened Eucharist, the divine bread-become-body, the reader is treated to a defiantly untransubstantiated piece of flesh, battered up and baked; in place of Christ, the enfleshed Word, we see a renegade nose masquerading as a general; and in place of obedient ears tilted to receive the living Word of God, we get nothing but 112 If the barber is in the habit of removing his clientele’s features, then his organ of choice— noses, both button-sized and beaked—rather gruesomely reinforces the pecking order of the senses in the story!

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noses—fleshy or button-shaped, pimpled or veined, stuffed full of snuff or sniffing out scents and sounds alike, these organs of earthly sensuality have supplanted the receptive ear in Peter’s imperial capital, plugging up the path to redemption. This, of course, is an inversion of the traditional hierarchy of the senses in the New Testament, in which ears represent the path to faith and noses barely merit a mention. As the trivial, status-driven socialites of Gogol’s tale fixate on the nose, with its sensual, sexual associations, they allow the ear to wither away from disuse, resulting in a society-wide inability to perceive God’s Logos, the chief instrument of salvation in Christianity; as is spelled out in Romans 10:17, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” In “The Nose,” a preening social climber aspires to advance from his peasant origins into the hereditary nobility (geographically represented as a journey from artisan Voznesnesky, the site of the mock Annunciation, to ­aristocratic Nevsky, whose giant cathedral stands empty on the church holiday). But his social and topographical ascent entails the loss of something even more vital than his physical integrity: along with his nose, the Major loses the ability to perceive the “living word” of God. As Gogol scholar Priscilla Meyer has noted, “Language, the living word, spoken and written, is the means of ­redemption throughout Gogol’s work.”113 In “The Nose,” the ear seems to exist solely on Voznesensky Prospect: all references to the organ, no matter how trivial or t­ravestied, appear at the beginning of the tale, in connection with Ivan Iakovlevich. Following the plot’s shift toward Nevsky, the sole mention of ears is Kovalev’s plea for God to take them, in place of his nose. Given the A ­ nnunciation theme of the work, this strong correlation of the ear with the Voznesensky-based part of the story seems significant, particularly in ­comparison to Nevsky society’s contrasting fixation on the nose at the expense of the ear. It appears that the hero’s shift from Voznesensky to Nevsky, while elevating him in Peter’s rank system from commoner to gentleman, has been accompanied by the loss of the redemptive Logos: to Gogol, ascension up the ladder of state requires the sacrifice of the living Word of God. And noses are not the city’s only escape artists; in this unholy town, the unheeded Word, too, takes flight: Gogol constructs the story around a central 113 Priscilla Meyer, “False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: ‘A May Night’ and ‘The Overcoat,’” in Essays on Gogol, 72.

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Christian metaphor and draws on popular literary sources in order to identify Kovalev’s fugitive nose with the lost word itself. Correspondingly, the hero loses his articulatory powers along with his nose, while the Nose itself gains a voice and generates competing narratives about his genesis and whereabouts (and not just in the story—nearly two centuries later, eager scholars continue to promote their own accounts). Meanwhile, the narrator undergoes his own narrative breakdown. His story, in many ways the “simplest” of Gogol’s ­Petersburg tales, fails to hold together: its boundaries drift off into ellipses, veer suddenly into digressions, and vanish into the fog, before finally concluding with an anticlimactic reattachment and the narrator’s unsatisfying shrug about the implausibility of it all; it is, in Gary Saul Morson’s words, “a sequence of ‘inexplicable phenomena’ related inexplicably to each other.”114 In short, this confounding narrative is a perfect reflection of its theme and setting: over the course of the tale, Kovalev’s face, the city of Petersburg, and the narrative form itself are all revealed to be resolutely fragmentary, the constituent parts of all three liable to break away and escape at any moment.115 (And that the nose ­reattaches as mysteriously as it once broke free cannot bring any real measure of assurance to its anxious wearer.) The Annunciation, an emblem of miraculous unity and transformation, provides an ironic framework for this story of fragmentation on a personal, societal, and narrative level: in place of a climactic Incarnation, Gogol’s “joke” exposes Petersburg as a city devoid of the divine Logos, its inhabitants as flesh devoid of spirit. Regardless of the narrator’s closing insistence that “such things happen in the world,” this distinctly Gogolian travesty of the Annunciation could have taken place only in Petersburg, a city founded and held together by the Word of a pretender god. If the basic plot of the Petersburg Text can be summed up as the struggle between Creator and subject over the creative word, then how could the essential contours of the Annunciation narrative—the day on which flesh unquestioningly submits to the Word—not be undermined here? In this imperial capital, 114 Gary Saul Morson, “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics,” in Essays on Gogol, 230. 115 Two of these imperiled entities are held together by a resident deity: the spirit of Peter keeps watch for any sign of willfulness in his divided city, while the narrator holds even this disconnected narrative in place—though just barely. Only the features of Kovalev’s face— in the absence of a true deity in this unholy city—fly apart and cohere at will, in defiance of the biblical appeal to wholeness.

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an emblem itself of Word-become-matter, a certain amount of self-determination is applauded: as we see at the newspaper office, for example, transactions take place via euphemism (as when a seventeen-year-old horse is advertised as “­ spirited and young”). Too much self-determination, however—such as an overbold newcomer manipulating the coordinates of rank, name, and address that ­constitute identity in Peter’s city—is subject to scrutiny. Certainly, the creation of a new being from word alone—the Major’s shady transformation from commoner to gentleman—would constitute an affront to the city’s “divine” creator and his step-by-step bureaucratic order, and the absurd autonomy of Kovalev’s nose represents his punishment for exploiting the city’s constituent sign system: no petty parvenu, even one who respects and plays the Petrine system so expertly, has the right to usurp Peter’s Word and call himself forth by name. Ultimately, the entire episode reads as Gogol’s parodic take on the post-Petrine condition: ­Kovalev’s pretentious bureaucratic imposture stands in for the imperial subject’s very real battle for control over his own identity. In the end, it might appear that the Major has learned his lesson about usurping power, and has regained his Christian name—with its peasant ­associations—along with his nose; indeed, in the nose’s absence, the ersatz Major seems to lose his grip on his surname and in time even reverts to his proper name (toward the end of the story, Madame Podtochina addresses him as “Platon Kuzmich”). We might expect Kovalev to appear chastened and subdued after his ordeal, like Evgenii following his fateful confrontation with the Horseman. After the nose’s reinstatement, however, it is difficult to discern proper penitence: indeed, Kovalev’s purchase of “some kind of medal ribbon [ordenskaia lentochka], for who knows what reason, since he was not himself the bearer of any such decoration” (75) indicates a continued fixation on emblems of status, merited or unmerited. It is important to remember that this is not a spirited, rebellious “little man” in the mold of his predecessor Evgenii, but rather a petty, status-driven subject who manipulates the tools of Peter’s order toward his own, trivial ends. Kovalev, like Germann, is the “son” of Peter: an ambitious arriviste who is right at home within the ranks of this called-forth city.116 Where Evgenii challenged Peter’s unnatural order, Germann and Kovalev 116 Indeed, perhaps it is the motherless birth of these rebellious sons that is the true travesty of this city!

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not only accept the order—they try to cheat their way to the top of it. Major Kovalev is not aiming to reach the same rival Word that Evgenii (and, later, Akakii) achieve at much cost; he is content, rather, to remain within the grid of Peter’s symbolic system, amassing all the buttons and badges of power within it. In the end, Kovalev remains a perfect, spiritless creature of the city; indeed, analysis of the topography of “The Nose” reveals the face of Petersburg to be as distorted as that of Kovalev: with its population forcibly divided by geography, status, and name, the city represents institutionalized fragmentation. Against the mysterious melding of spirit and flesh celebrated on the Feast of the Annunciation, Gogol’s heroes—man and city alike—flaunt matter grotesquely divided from spirit, flesh and stone tragically alienated from the divine Word.

5 Kako sdelan Akakii Letter as Hero in “The Overcoat”

Written and published just a few years after the 1837 publication of The Bronze Horseman, Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” bears the unmistakable i­nfluence of that earlier Petersburg povest’.1 The two works share a multitude of themes, images, and motifs and even resound with echoes on a lexical level. But the primary point of contact between the two stories is their shared Petersburg setting; the two authors establish a similarly hostile natural environment, permeated by fog, ­darkness, and a damp chill. Likewise, the joyful noise and chatter of the P ­ ushkinian social scene (“I blesk, i shum, i govor balov”) are imported directly into Gogol’s city: “All of this—the noise, the chatter, the crowd of people [shum, govor, i tolpa liudei]—all of it was strange and wonderful to Akakii Akakievich.”2 More significantly, the works recount the same central drama: a mild Petersburg clerk loses something he cherishes, raises his voice to an authority figure, and loses his life as a result; in Gogol’s tale, however, any tragedy is offset and even undercut by the absurd. The three adversaries of Pushkin’s story   1 In the version of the poem that Zhukovsky published in The Contemporary in 1837, the pivotal confrontation scene had been considerably altered to make it acceptable to the censor; an unedited version of the poem would not appear in print until 1866. My comparison of the works is based on the version available to Gogol. On the posthumous publication history of The Bronze Horseman, see Izmailov, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’ A. S. P ­ ushkina,” 227–65.   2 Pushkin, PSS, 5:137; Gogol, PSS, 3:160. References to “The Overcoat,” found in volume 3 of the Polnoe sobranie, will generally be identified in the text by page number only.

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r­ eappear in Gogol’s, though in comically downgraded form: “poor, poor Evgenii” is reborn as the pathetic copyist Akakii, who loves and loses an article of clothing; the wonderworking tsar Peter returns as the drunken, one-eyed tailor P ­ etrovich; and the devastating flood is reduced to a nipping frost. Even the Bronze Horseman himself turns up in “The Overcoat,” though he too has been demoted to a statue so exposed and unthreatening that its tail is cut off: when there is nothing left to talk about, we learn, the whist-playing clerks of Petersburg endlessly retell a joke about “the horse of Falconet’s monument [who] had had its tail docked” (146). Even the proud, masculine steed (kon’) of Pushkin’s poem has been reduced to a horse (loshad’) in Gogol’s story; one long equine nose intrudes on Akakii’s mid-street reveries (145) just before the famous tail is removed in that “eternal” anecdote. And just as the Horseman makes his brief, inglorious appearance in “The Overcoat,” so does an overcoat show up in The Bronze Horseman: in his first scene, Evgenii arrives home and shakes off his shinel’ before climbing into bed: “Itak, domoi prished, Evgenii / Striakhnul shinel’, razdelsia, leg.”3 His discarded garment will be picked up and revived in Gogol’s later story; perhaps, in an extension of that old axiom attributed to Dostoevsky, Akakii actually emerged from under Evgenii’s overcoat. But perhaps the most important feature of Gogol’s Pushkinian inheritance is the peculiar, verbally charged Petersburg atmosphere, which fairly crackles with performative language. In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin describes a world where Peter the Great calls a city forth by word alone; where the mute Evgenii achieves a rival word powerful enough to call the Horseman down from his pedestal; in short, where the Word itself functions to create and subvert order, to bestow and undermine authority. In “The Overcoat,” Gogol becomes heir to this Petersburg of the creative Word, elaborating it into an entire city of performative letters.

A Superfluous Letter in Petersburg: The Alphabetic Context of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” Gogol scholarship of the past few decades, perhaps incapacitated beneath nearly two centuries of ardent yet irreconcilable readings, has tended to construe “Overcoat,” along with its hero Akakii Akakievich, as pure literary performance, devoid of definitive meaning. The inarticulate copy clerk has   3 Pushkin, PSS, 5:139.

Kako sdelan Akakii

been critically demoted to a “verbal formula,” an “ink homunculus” and “little more than a verbal artifact.”4 Charles Bernheimer reduces the hero to still finer verbal rubble, arguing that Akakii “actually becomes a text, a text, however, that can be deciphered not as a series of significant signs but only as a succession of discrete letters.”5 This chapter pursues a very literal extension of this line of scholarly investigation, presenting Akakii as an individual alphabetic character. In this reading, Akakii’s linguistic journey is reconsidered and literalized as an isolated letter’s search for content, context, and, ultimately, significance. The history of “The Overcoat” criticism may be summed up as one of form vs. content, with one camp arguing over the tale’s meaning, the other over its means.6 This struggle is concisely illustrated in critics’ widely divergent ­reactions to the story’s central, unforgettable name. In the 175 years since the literary birth of Akakii Akakievich, much critical heat has been generated over the ­derivation of the character’s extraordinary moniker. On one end of the critical spectrum, the Formalists follow Boris Eichenbaum in relegating the name to the class of linguistic devices that compose the story; in his view, Akakii Akakievich becomes merely “an original mimicry of articulation, a sound-­ gesture,” devoid of any independent meaning.7 Other critics argue that, beyond providing acoustic material for the punning, playful narrator, the name   4 Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 141; Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 318; Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 199.   5 Charles C. Bernheimer, “Cloaking the Self: The Literary Space of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975): 56.   6 While nineteenth-century Gogol criticism focused primarily on the social, a twentieth-­ century countertradition turned from the sociological to the stylistic, locating the “meaning” of Gogol in his words and devices. These modern challengers to the conventional social critics—including Formalists like Eichenbaum, Symbolists like Bely, Nabokov, and contemporary critics like Popkin—turn a spotlight on the signifier itself, rather than what is being signified. As Todd points out, however, these two major critical trends are not necessarily at odds. In adherence to what Todd terms the Gogolian logic of “both . . . and,” we see that “some of the most rigorously social readings have managed to contribute important insights into its structure and style,” just as “those who have challenged the sociological tradition have, no less paradoxically, begun to clear the way for socially and historically aware readings” (Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 168–69). In keeping with his observation, while my reading may (quite literally) turn language into the tale’s hero, this linguistic focus acts in service to a broader socio-historical argument.   7 Boris Eichenbaum et al., “The Structure of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” Russian Review 22, no. 4 (1963): 386.

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Akakii “leads to deep layers of significance within the story.”8 In religious ­readings of the work, for instance, the copyist is seen as a descendent of the sixth-century martyr St. Acacius;9 psychoanalysts, in contrast, sniff out the embedded children’s word “kaka” at the seat of Akakii.10 While many scholars focus on the name’s hagiographical, moral, or scatological associations, arguing that the strange, intentional name must reveal valuable information about its possessor and his story, others note that the name Akakii manages to unite the saintly, the humble, and the fecal within its sound structure and etymology. An intermediary line of scholarship sifts for meaning among the pun-rich phonetic material identified by the Formalists. Working along these critical lines, this study locates yet another layer of meaning in the name, taking its lead from the hero’s special relationship with letters. Various scholarly readings have been advanced to explain the duplication of the word kak at the heart of Akakii Akakievich: where L. Michael O’Toole hears “the anguished repetition of the existential question ‘how?’” in the hero’s name, Victor Brombert argues that kak “embeds the principle of sameness in Akaky’s name, determining, it would seem, his single-minded, life-long activity of copying and implicit condemnation to sameness.”11 In a similar vein, this chapter suggests that the name Akakii derives, at least in part, from the old Slavic letter Kako (K); I argue that the significance of this root word lies not only in its semantics, however, but also in its function as the name of the Cyrillic letter. At the time of the tale’s composition, Kako served as a formal name for the letter K. Until about 1900, each letter went by a similarly mnemonic title, ­inherited from Church Slavonic: A was known as Az, or “I”; Б was Buki, or “Letters,” and so on. It is possible that such official names invested the Cyrillic letters with some level of significance to begin with; the proper name Slovo   8 Sloane, “Name as Phonetic Icon,” 475.   9 F. C. Driessen, Gogol as a Short-Story Writer: A Study of His Technique of Composition, trans. Ian F. Finlay (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 194; John Schillinger, “Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ as a Travesty of Hagiography,” Slavic and East European Journal 6, no. 1 (1972): 36–41. 10 I. D. Ermakov, Ocherki po analizu tvorchestva N. V. Gogolia: Organichnost’ proizvedenii Gogolia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1924), 139. 11 L. Michael O’Toole, Structure, Style, and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 22; Victor Brombert, “Meanings and Indeterminacy in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 135, no. 4 (1991): 570.

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(Word), after all, is inherently more meaningful than the empty sound “Ess.” One might even speculate that, within such an alphabetic context, it would not have been such a stretch to personify a written character as a literary character. As several scholars have observed, variations on the word kak recur with unusual frequency throughout the text: in addition to its twin echo with every mention of Akakii Akakievich, kako also provides the basis for all the approximating slovechki (like kak-to, kak budto, kakoi-nibud’, nikak, etc.) so favored by the narrator. Indeed, in the rough draft of “The Overcoat,” the narrator himself calls attention to the preponderance of the letter K in his manuscript: “Of course it might have been possible, in some way, to avoid the constant convergences of the letter K, but circumstances were such that it was impossible to do this.”12 If Akakii serves as a living embodiment of the letter Kako, then the narrator’s self-conscious reference to the overpopulation of Ks in his text may serve as a punning allusion to the coupling of two Kakos with every mention of Akakii Akakievich. Even in a text overrun by the letter K, the famous naming episode that launches “The Overcoat” features a conspicuous cacophony of kak and its derivatives: “Be assured that it was not at all sought out, but that ­circumstances fell into place all on their own such that it was in no way possible to give him any other name, and it happened precisely like this” (Mozhno uverit’, chto ego nikak ne iskali, a chto sami soboiu sluchilis’ takie obstoiatel’stva, chto nikak nel’zia bylo dat’ drugogo imeni, i eto proizoshlo vot kak).13 The passage is constructed as if to draw the reader’s attention specifically to the letter’s centrality in the hero’s name; in fact, with a slight change of emphasis, this final clause could loosely be translated as, “the name originated (proizoshlo) namely thus: Kak!” Read in this light, the sentence becomes a playful word puzzle spelling out the name’s etymology. Why would Gogol have chosen a letter as the basis of his most famous onomastic creation? As scholars have observed, the embedded word kak, with its double meaning of “like” and “how,” evokes the notions of agency and 12 “Konechno mozhno bylo, nekotorym obrazom, izbezhat’ chastogo sblizheniia bukvy k, no obstoiatel’stva byli takogo roda, chto nikak nel’zia bylo eto sdelat’.” See Eichenbaum et al., “Structure of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” 385; and Julia Alissandratos, “Filling in Some Holes in Gogol”s Not Wholly Unholy ‘Overcoat,’” Slavonic and East European Review 68, no. 1 (1990): 27. 13 PSS, 3:142, my emphasis.

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approximation and cements the principle of sameness. In addition to the semantics of the letter’s official name, the individual letter K can also function as a preposition, signifying one’s movement toward something else, usually another person; like any preposition, however, k requires an object, a kto, in order to fully acquire its meaning: k komu (toward whom). This relational meaning of K, as well as the preposition’s utter meaninglessness out of context, suggest a journey from alienation and senselessness toward community and significance. In the absence of a surrounding context, however, K remains nothing but an empty form: as the literary scholar Patricia Crain points out, “the [smallest] unit of textual meaning—the letter—lacks meaning itself.”14 In short, the letter Kako’s literal meanings (“like,” “how,” and “toward another”), as well as its status as an individual letter—cut off from the chain of signifiers, standing for nothing on its own—are indicative of the hero Akakii’s position: alienated from a meaningful context, he is but a blank reverberation, incapable of signifying anything beyond himself.

“Az Buki Vedi”: The Alphabetic Background The chronicle of Russian orthography is punctuated by battles over various “superfluous” letters. A partial victory was declared with Peter the Great’s orthographic reforms of 1708–10, in which certain obsolete characters were eliminated from the Russian language.15 In addition, the printed Russian alphabet assumed modern shape when Peter himself oversaw the creation of a new civil script; the triumph of his “European, secular” script over the ­“ barbarous, clerical” Church Slavonic characters became a graphic emblem of the Petrine enlightenment.16 Following Peter’s orthographic overhaul, p­ eriodic 14 Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 18. 15 In addition to four out-of-use letters (Ksi, Psi, Omega, and Ius’ malyi� , , , and ), the Petrine reforms eliminated from secular usage all diacritics (with the exception of й) and titli (superscript marks indicating abbreviations). 16 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 53, 61. The Petrine restructuring of the alphabet marked a turning point in the ongoing struggle between secular and sacred letters: by the early eighteenth century, no sharp distinction had existed between the vernacular and liturgical language; now, for the first time, there appeared a visual distinction between Russian and Church Slavonic writing.

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adjustments and suggestions for further change were proposed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culminating in a second alphabetic pruning in 1917.17 Between these two major reforms, the 1820s and 1830s witnessed a marked revival of interest in the form and significance of the Cyrillic letters, as the literati argued over anticipated alphabet reforms and fought for the preservation of certain obsolete characters. Their debates over these ­“superfluous” Slavonic letters, which were widely reported in the mainstream press and discussed in scholarly circles, generated impassioned responses both poetic and scientific.18 Creative treatments of the alphabet question tended to feature personified letters; indeed, according to Mikhail Vaiskopf, the period in question saw a rebirth of the playful tradition associating the letters of the alphabet with social figures, and particularly with members of the Russian bureaucratic hierarchy.19 The literary use of anthropomorphic alphabets was already firmly established by the nineteenth century, famously modeled by eminent eighteenth-century authors like Lomonosov, Fonvizin, and Kantemir. Lomonosov’s 1750 play Trial of the Russian Letters, in which the letters voice long-standing quarrels with each other over position and merit, brought literary visibility to the tradition of personified letters.20 In this humorous sketch, Grammar brings the Russian characters to a court presided over by Reason and Custom, so that they may state their case regarding place and distinction. Each presents his assets, as well as his particular 17 The reforms of 1917, designed by philologist Aleksei Shakhmatov and carried out shortly after the revolution, eliminated four more archaic letters (ѣ, i, γ, ѳ) as well as the redundant hard sign (ъ) at the end of words. 18 For a concise review of these polemics, see M. P. Alekseev, “Zapis’ Pushkina o ‘Tragedii, sostavlennoi iz azbuki frantsuzskoi,’” in Pushkin: Sravnitel’no-istoricheskie issledovaniia (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), 401–10. Alekseev provided the first full account of the orthography question, summarizing the heated intellectual atmosphere surrounding Pushkin’s own brief additions to the debates. Literary scholar Mikhail Vaiskopf and Professor of Philology Svetlana Drugoveiko-Dolzhanskaia both build on Alekseev’s superb foundation, contributing to the list of scientific, literary, and mystical responses to the alphabet question in their own research. Vaiskopf was the first to bring the discussion of these polemics together with an analysis of “The Overcoat.” See Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 321–23; and Svetlana Drugoveiko-Dolzhanskaia: “K istorii russkoi azbuki,” in Iazyk i tekst: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik pamiati M. A. Sokolovoi, ed. V. V. Kolesov (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo St. Peterburgskogo universiteta, 1998), 238–50. 19 Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 321. 20 M. V. Lomonosov, “Sud rossiiskikh pis’men, pered razumom i obychaem ot grammatiki predstavlennyx,” in PSS, 7:384.

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Fig. 5  Cyrillic letters and their names prior to the Petrine reforms. Eliminated letters are marked with an asterisk; double asterisks denote letters that have changed form. I. I. Balitskii. Materialy dlia istorii slavianskogo iazykoznaniia (Kiev, 1876). grievances against other letters; Iat’ (ѣ), for instance, complains that “E is driving me out of my place, my property, and my inheritance, though I will not admit defeat.”21 Kantemir’s Second Satire (1727–29) and Fonvizin’s “General Court Grammar” (1786) similarly draw on this tradition, allegorically associating the 21 “Е выгоняет меня из мѣста, владѣния и наслѣдия, однако я не уступлю” (ibid.).

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letters of the alphabet with members of the courtly or bureaucratic hierarchy. Fonvizin, for instance, equates the p­ oluglasnye (semivowels, such as й) with poluboiare (semiboyars), archly asserting that “A semiboyar is one who has already left the voiceless but has not yet joined the ranks of the voiced [glasnye; vowels]; or, to put it another way, one who, though voiceless among the voiced, is already voiced among the voiceless.”22 Following the example of these authors, the literary use of anthropomorphic alphabets and personified letters underwent a renaissance in the years just preceding Gogol’s composition of “The Overcoat.” In the late 1820s, this curious convention was most prominently displayed in a pair of famous missives written from the point of view of the letters Izhitsa (γ) and Ier (Ъ), in which these “endangered” characters defend their position in the alphabet by appealing to their illustrious genealogies and long service to the state.23 According to scholars, the new wave of excitement and curiosity over the Russian alphabet was sparked in part by the publication of Nikolai Grech’s influential grammars of 1827.24 A moderate reformer, Grech singled out certain redundant letters for expulsion from the alphabet, including Izhitsa. The critic and editor Nikolai Nadezhdin quickly jumped to the disgraced letter’s defense, complaining that Grech had “chased Izhitsa from the alphabetic Eden,” and responding with a humorous poem titled “Izhitsa to Az” (Izhitsa k Azu).25 Nadezhdin’s celebrated piece, published in The Herald of Europe [Vestnik Evropy] in 1828, features the desperate pleas of the exiled letter Izhitsa, a target of many nineteenth-century orthographic reformers. The persecuted letter appeals to Az (А), the “Sovereign first-born of the

22 “Poluboiarin est’ tot, kotoryi uzhe vyshel iz bezglasnykh, no ne popal eshche v glasnye; ili, inache skazat’, tot, kotoryi pred glasnymi khotia eshche bezglasnyi, no pred bezglasnymi uzhe glasnyi” (D. I. Fonvizin, “Vseobshchaia pridvornaia grammatika,” in Pervoe polnoe sobranie sochinenii, kak original’nykh, tak i perevodnykh 1761–1792 [St. Petersburg: K. K. Shamov, 1888], 833). 23 Note that all references to Ier refer only to the back Ier (Ъ); the front Ier’ (Ь), was not at issue in these debates. 24 Alekseev (“Zapis’ Pushkina,” 402) traces the origin of the nineteenth-century orthography debates to the publication of Grech’s Prakticheskaia russkaia grammatika, while Drugoveiko-­ Dolzhanskaia (“K istorii russkoi azbuki”) connects it to his Prostrannaia russkaia grammatika; both works were published in St. Petersburg in 1827. 25 N. I. Nadezhdin, “Izhitsa k Azu,” Vestnik Evropy 162, no. 23 (1828): 187–94.

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characters,” pleading her case for continued residency in the “family of letters.”26 She recalls past perils, such as the orthographic reforms of Peter, when “With a motion of Peter’s hand, we were gripped by a new alarm! Our ancient calm was shaken! And—a revolution was begun!” and reminds Az of various fallen brothers and sisters, including round-bellied Fita (θ), angular, sinuous Ksi (ξ), and three-pronged Psi (Ψ).27 Izhitsa plays on Az’s sense of family honor (“plead for the honor of your native sister”), finally appealing to her “faithful brother and friend” for his protection from the overzealous reformers.28 Her own self-defense rests on her illustrious genealogy and varied service as she matured from Upsilon into Igrek.29 A similar petition for mercy, this time from Ier, was advanced the following year. According to Pushkin scholar L. A. Chereisky, during an 1829 stay in Petersburg the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt publicly advanced his opinion on the “uselessness of the existence of the hard sign in the Russian alphabet.”30 His assessment was countered the following day in the form of a humorous letter from the affronted hard sign, composed by the then-famous writer A. A. Perovsky (under his nom de plume Antonii Pogorel’sky). Like Izhitsa before him, Ier builds his defense on issues of ancestry, service to the empire, and citizenship: “I am the letter Ier [Ъ], and I occupy a rather important place in the Russian alphabet. Around ten centuries have passed since the day of my birth, and no one has dared to deny my existence or to dispute those services which I have rendered, and continue to render, to the Russian language to this day.”31 Humboldt responded with his own witty letter the next day, and the entire curious exchange was published in an April 1830 issue of Literaturnaia 26 “Derzhavnyi pervenets pis’men”; “bukv sem’ia” (ibid., 186, 192). 27 “Po maniiu ruki Petrovoi / Obialis’ my trevogoi novoi! / Potriassia drevnii nash pokoi! / I— revoliutsiia nastala!” (ibid., 191); the original descriptions are as follows: “kruglobriukhaia, tolstaia Fita,” “uglovataia zmeika Ksi,” and “troezubaia vilka Psi” (ibid., 187). 28 “Vstupis’ za chest’ sestry rodimoi”; “vernyi brat i drug” (ibid., 193). 29 Ibid., 190. Izhitsa’s ancient ancestors include the Greek Upsilon (Y) and the Latin I graeca (or “Greek I”), which was used only to spell foreign words. Modern-day cousins include the German Upsilon, numerous variations on I grec in the Romance languages, and the letter Y in the modern English alphabet. 30 “Gumbol’dt vyskazal svoe mnenie o bespoleznosti sushchestvovaniia bukvy tverdyi znak (‘ъ’) v russkoi azbuke” (L. A. Chereiskii, “Pushkin i Aleksandr Gumbol’dt,” in Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy [Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1956], 1:254–55). 31 Literaturnaia gazeta, April 16, 1830, 173.

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gazeta, along with an editorial preface generally attributed to Viazemsky.32 ­Ultimately, the arguments in defense of γ and Ъ—hinging as they do on issues of lineage, hierarchy, state service, citizenship, and exile—position both literary events squarely within the eighteenth-century tradition associating alphabetic form and order with the Russian bureaucracy. Various other treatments of the alphabet question abounded, and between 1828 and 1832 the pages of such widely read journals as The Moscow Herald (Moskovskii vestnik), Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva), Moscow Telegraph (Moskovskii telegraf), and Rumor brimmed with orthographic discourse. Another particularly faddish literary treatment of the alphabet question ­materialized in 1828, the same year Gogol arrived in Petersburg, in the anonymously published “Manuscript of the Deceased Khabarov,” written by P. L. Iakovlev, the brother of Pushkin’s lyceum friend.33 The work consists of the fictional autobiography of a certain Khabarov, a retired proofreader and printer who bears a striking resemblance to another copyist who would make his own literary debut in 1842.34 Like Akakii after him, Khabarov contents himself with the humblest of meals, is indifferent to dress, and, most interestingly, copies letters for fun in his free time: “Whenever I was typesetting a book, I thought about improving the letters of the alphabet: instead of relaxing, after work I would draw the forms of letters and ponder this muddled alphabet of ours!”35 He even chooses favorites and least-favorites among them, deriding Ier as a 32 As Chereiskii points out, this exchange would most certainly have been familiar to Pushkin, who had recently performed some of the editorial duties at Literaturnaia gazeta during Del’vig and Viazemskii’s absence from Petersburg ( January–February 1830), and who continued to follow the journal’s publication closely (“Pushkin i Aleksandr Gumbol’dt,” 256). Indeed, Humboldt’s final response appears on the same page as a notice for the third edition of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, further corroborating the likelihood of the poet’s familiarity with the clever exchange. Likewise, the young Gogol, an enthusiastic acolyte of Pushkin, eager to advance his own literary reputation in the capital, is likely to have followed such celebrated events in the journal associated with his idol. 33 P. L. Iakovlev, “Rukopis’ pokoinogo Klementiia Akimovicha Khabarova, soderzhashchaia rassuzhdenie o russkoi azbuke i biografiiu ego, im samim pisannuiu. S prisovokupleniemportreta i s”emka s pocherka sego znamenitogo muzha,” Moscow, 1828, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ service/gdc/scd0001/2007/20070821001ru/20070821001ru.pdf. 34 The scholar Mikhail Bezrodny has also observed the correspondences between Khabarov and Akakii, encapsulating them in his brief electronic article “Na poliakh ‘Shineli,’” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 16 (2006), http://www.utoronto.ca.tsq/16/bezrodnii16.shtml. 35 Iakovlev, “Rukopis’,” 25.

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“sponger,” and Iat’ as a “pushy hypocrite or troublesome idler.”36 Khabarov’s “diary” gives way to a lengthy treatise on the alphabet, in which he contends that only twenty-seven letters are truly necessary to the Russian language. The work was widely discussed in the press, and reviewers from The Moscow Herald, Son of the Fatherland, and Moscow Telegraph agreed, at least conditionally, with the fictional printer’s ideas for alphabet reform.37 In addition to the polemics surrounding the superfluous letters, the ­question of discerning some sort of intrinsic meaning among the alphabet’s shapes and sounds likewise became fashionable at the start of the nineteenth century. In one 1829 article in The Moscow Herald, for instance, a young linguist named Dmitrii Obleukhov earnestly attempted to prove that the characters of various ancient alphabets derived from graphic representations of human faces and bodies. In his treatise, for instance, the Latin “L” represents the nose, “M” the mouth, and the lowercase “a” the eye.38 He argues that the figures of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets preserve traces of these human representations, and that God himself had collected these hieroglyphs together into a sort of “living, organic alphabet within the body of his finest creation: man.”39 Though Obleukhov’s treatise now reads as little more than a dilettantish fantasy, it is nonetheless worth noting that his exploration of these ancient characters ­coincided with Pushkin’s interest in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets;40 this concurrence points toward a more widespread nineteenth-century interest in ancient writing systems and “living letters.”41 Along with the search for meaning among the letters’ forms, efforts to interpret their formal Church Slavonic names in alphabetic succession as coherent text were also quite prevalent and widely published in these years—in fact, one of the earliest attempts to decode the alphabet’s imenniki was mocked by Pushkin himself. In the commentary to his 1823 edition of The Igor Tale, the 36 “Tuneiadets”; “pronyrlivyi litsemer ili khlopotlivyi bezdel’nik” (ibid., 39). 37 For full reviews, see Moskovskii vestnik 2, no. 17 (1828): 69–73; Syn otechestva 120, no. 8 (1828): 81–84; and Moskovskii telegraf 21, no. 11 (1828): 503–6. 38 D. A. Obleukhov, “Otryvki iz pis’ma k N. o gieroglificheskom iazyke,” Moskovskii vestnik, no. 4 (1829): 106–8. 39 “Tvorets prirody soedinil [gieroglify] v zhivoi organicheskii alfabet v tele prekrasneishego svoego sozdaniia—cheloveka” (ibid., 105). 40 See Alekseev, “Zapis’ Pushkina,” 406n12. 41 Alekseev notes that such mystical ruminations were typical of the time. See ibid., 406–7.

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philologist and literary scholar N. F. Grammatin contended that the letters of the Slavic alphabet, “apart from the simple letter names, contain meaning.”42 Pushkin objected strongly to Grammatin’s suppositions, scoffing, “The letters that make up the Slavonic alphabet do not possess any meaning whatsoever. Az, Buki, Vedi, Glagol’, Dobro, etc., are individual words, chosen only for their initial sound.”43 Similarly, in 1832 The Telescope (Teleskop) published a lengthy article by the writer-philologist Orest Evetsky arguing that each alphabet possesses its own symbolic, mystical idea. He concludes his piece with his own reconstruction of the original “meaning” behind the Cyrillic letters: “I, God all-knowing, command: it is good to live by the sprouting of the land and, like people, to think. In that is our peace. Pronounce this exhortation with feeling” (Я, Бог Всеведущий, заповедываю: хорошо есть жить произрастениями земли и, подобно людям, мыслить. В том наш покой. Произноси наставление [сие] с чувством).44 A reviewer for the same journal, hiding behind the letter “K,” objected to Evetsky’s formulation, stating that “Neither was there in the beginning, nor is there now, any meaning in them.”45 Even for this seemingly levelheaded reviewer, however, the current fascination with letters proves i­rresistible, and he goes on to propose his own, simplified “meaning” for the Russian alphabet: “I (who) Know the Letters. The Word Is a Very Good (thing)! Earth And the People Who (are on it)! Think: It is Our Peace! Say the Word Firmly” [Аз Буквы Ведый. Глагол Добро Есть Зело! Земля И Иже (на ней) Люди! Мыслите: Наш Он Покой! Рцы Слово Твердо].46 Finally, in 1831, the delightfully named “A. Bukov” published a plan for the exclusion of certain letters in Rumor.47 A reluctant reformer, Bukov (a pseudonym 42 N. F. Grammatin, ed., Slovo o polku Igoreve (Moscow, 1823), 113. His full, annotated translation, quoted in Drugoveiko-Dolzhanskaia, “K istorii russkoi azbuki,” reads, “Я Бога ведаю, глаголю: добро есть [тому], живет [в древне-славянской грамматике Вин. пад. сходен с Им. и живет что, а не на чем] на земле кто и, как люди, мыслит; наш Он [т. е. Бог] покой рцу, Слово [т. е. имя Божие; перевод греческого логос] твержу, и пр.” 43 “Bukvy, sostavliaiushchie slavenskuiu azbuku, ne predstavliaiut nikakogo smysla. Az, buki, vedi, glagol’, dobro etc. sut’ otdel’nye slova, vybrannye tol’ko dlia nachal’nogo ikh zvuka” (PSS 12:180). 44 Orest Evetskii, “Gipoteticheskii khod chelovecheskogo uma, izobrataiushchego grafiku,” Teleskop 8, no. 7 (1832), 341. 45 “K,” “O russkoi azbuke (otryvok iz pis’ma),” Teleskop 7, no. 23 (1832), 430. 46 Ibid., 431. 47 A. Bukov, “Vvedenie v noveishuiu russkuiu grammatiku,” Molva 19 (1831), 1–9.

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for Nadezhdin)48 clearly feels sympathy for many of the “endangered” letters of the alphabet, and lovingly recounts their “genealogies” and distinct personalities while deliberating which to “exclude from the permanent staff.”49 Unlike many alphabet reformers, Bukov insisted on the symbolic meaning of the letters. He played with the principles of personified letters, discovering among their names a philosophical narrative: “Az [I]—a man is born; Buki [Letters; Buka is also a mythical creature used to frighten children]—he fears everything in his infancy; Vedi [Know]—he begins to learn; he receives Glagol [the Word] and learns that Dobro [Good] Est’ [Exists], (and it) Zhivet [Lives] on Zemlia [Earth]” (Aз—человек родится; Буки—страшится всего в младенчестве; Веди—начинает познавать; получает Глагол (слово) и уверяется, что Добро Есть, Живет на Земле).50 Bukov’s unbridled love for his favorite letters (“Ah! If only you could know how I love them all! How hard it was to write my philippic against them!”), their humanization under his pen (“I find in them the first impressions of infancy, knowledge, the ability to speak—that precious advantage of man”), is touchingly reminiscent of Akakii chuckling over his own favority.51 In short, the question of the alphabet was on everyone’s lips throughout Gogol’s time in the Russian capital. The author arrived in St. Petersburg in 1828, just as the most recent wave of the orthography question began to swell. He immediately inserted himself into Petersburg’s literary and academic circles and would undoubtedly have been familiar with both the issues and polemics surrounding the alphabet and with its various literary treatments. During the most vigorous period of discussion, Gogol composed his Petersburg tales, four of which appeared in 1835 and 1836. “The Overcoat” was composed between 1839 and 1841 and published in his Collected Works of 1842; there is ample evidence to suggest that the work was conceived and developed much earlier, however, at the height of debate over the superfluous letters.52 48 Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 322. 49 “V polnom li komplekte tridtsati piati bukv, ili vykliuchu nekotorye iz shtata,” wonders Bukov (“Vvedenie,” 3). 50 Ibid., 8. 51 “Akh! Esli by znali, kak ia ravno liubliu ikh! Kak tiazhelo bylo pisat’ protiv nikh moiu filippiku!” (ibid., 7); “ia nakhozhu v nikh pervoe vpechatlenie mladenchestva, znanie, sposobnost’ govorit’—dragotsennoe preimushchestvo cheloveka” (ibid., 7–8). 52 One commonly cited source for the story is relayed in a letter the young author wrote to his mother in 1830, describing his first Petersburg winter in his own threadbare summer

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The alphabet—much like the deck of cards in “The Queen of Spades”— would have provided Gogol a suitable space to work out issues of rank and order within the bureaucratic world of Petersburg. Within the alphabet, a haven of c­lassification and control, each character occupies a strictly ­designated place. Even within this seemingly meaningless realm of alphabetic symbols, a hierarchy is still in operation: Az is king, and Izhitsa must beg to be included. Her supplications before the almighty Az illustrate that rank and status are seen as powerful forces within the alphabetic order. The superfluous letters’ assertions of long service and ancient lineage implicitly recall the Petrine legacy of bureaucracy: after all, Peter the Great himself had dictated the content, order, and form of the contemporary Cyrillic alphabet, casting out certain old letters and reordering the rest, and his name was still strongly associated with the alphabet’s new shape. The simplified civil azbuka, drawn up and decreed by the tsar himself, exemplifies his reverence for ­hierarchy and control; his pitiless exclusion of outmoded letters, despite their ancient “lineage” or illustrious name, mirrors his establishment of the Table of Ranks and the privileging of worth over birth: a few years after the orthographic reforms, Peter would reorganize the military and civil services along parallel lines, dividing its members into fourteen rigidly hierarchical classes, according to merit. Though his system was nominally merit-based, the tsar ensured that every citizen knew his proper place.

Az—Buki: Akakii as Letter The text of Gogol’s “Overcoat” incorporates numerous hints about Akakii’s overly familiar relationship with letters. The hero’s initials, А. Б., implicitly draw attention to his alphabetic origins: as in the Greek and other Western words for the alphabet, the Russian term “azbuka” is formed from these first two letters (Az and Buki). While old mnemonics and primers dating from Gogol’s time overcoat (PSS, 10:169–70). Critics have also pointed out Pushkin’s diary entry concerning the robberies of certain “persons of consequence” in Petersburg; the observation was recorded in 1833, during a period of lively contact between the two writers (see Julian Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat [London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000], 64). Finally, according to Gogol’s friend P. V. Annenkov, the initial inspiration for “The Overcoat”—the oft-repeated anecdote about a poor clerk who attains and loses a hunting gun—dated from the mid-1830s. Cited in Woodward, Symbolic Art of Gogol, 88; and Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, 63.

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Fig. 6  A chart showing Peter’s personal elimination of “superfluous” letters from his reformed alphabet. Central Russian State Library. taught “Аз Буки Веди,” or “I know the letters,” Akakii’s initials suggest “Аз— Буки,” or “I am the letter(s).” But with so many letters to choose from, how exactly did Gogol settle on Kako? In contemplating the potential alphabetical basis for the choice of the letter K, it is worth noting that the threatened letters of the day were lowly characters of negligible status, far from the almighty Az: Ksi, Psi, and Izhitsa, for instance, came fortieth, forty-first, and forty-second in the forty-two-letter azbuka. Kako, on the other hand, was a sort of “middling” letter in the alphabetic order; stuck on a rung neither low nor high, the thirteenth letter was, like Akakii himself, an eternally average character.53 Perhaps not surprisingly, the focus of the orthography debates never strayed from those characters at the very top (Az) and those at the bottom (Izhitsa and her friends),

53 I would like to thank one of my anonymous reviewers for a version of this chapter that appeared in The Russian Review for bringing this “middling letter” reading to my attention.

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while those in the middle remained critically overlooked.54 If Akakii ­Bashmachkin’s initials divulge his alphabetic domain, then the literal basis of his name and patronymic (Kako) reveal his fated position within it: no matter how many obsolete letters might be shorn from the sequence (and most of the letters deemed inessential were grouped at the tail end of the alphabet), К would always find itself right in the middle of the pack—an uncelebrated but essential member of the hierarchy. A “chinovnik dlia pis’ma” (a literal servant of the letter), Akakii’s sole bureaucratic occupation lies in the reproduction of others’ words; far from being bored by the seemingly stultifying nature of his position, however, the clerk finds singular delight in letters and their calligraphic reproduction. He copies and recopies with ardor and tenderness, the strength of his emotions betraying an unusual intimacy between the man and his copied-out characters: “It would be too little to say that he served zealously—no, he served with love” (144). At home, after he has satisfied his meager physical needs, he copies more letters out of both enjoyment and a sort of textual insatiability: “Noticing that his stomach had begun to swell, he would rise from the table, take out a bottle of ink, and set about copying documents he had brought home” (145). He compulsively makes duplicate copies for himself “for his own pleasure” (145), then drifts to sleep, dreaming only of the comely consonants he might encounter the following day: “Having written to his heart’s content, he would go to bed, smiling ahead of time at the thought of the next day: what was it God would send him to copy tomorrow?” (146). The pen serves as a physical connection between the copyist and his work; perhaps in the absence of a flesh-and-blood mother (who is referred to as deceased even at Akakii’s birth)55 or father (who seems to have contributed only a name to his son’s conception), this conduit between body and text acts as a sort of umbilical cord, providing Akakii with his sole source of spiritual union and nourishment. The narrator hints that Akakii truly lives within his own paper world, inhabiting the clean, even lines of copy alongside his own calligraphic letters: “You could scarcely have found another man who lived so 54 One of the most famous titles from the period, “Izhitsa k Azu,” is emblematic of this phenomenon: perhaps the true superfluous letter here is the lowercase k sandwiched between the two alphabetic VIPs! 55 “Pokoinitsa matushka” (PSS, 3:142).

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much in his work” (Vriad li gde mozhno bylo naiti cheloveka, kotoryi tak zhil by v svoei dolzhnosti).56 In early versions of the story, copying provides Akakii a safe and pleasant space, separate from office tormenters and twenty-below chills; by the final version, this private parchment world has bloomed into an entire cosmos, diverse and satisfying: “There, in that copying, he saw some varied and pleasant world of his own” (144). Akakii’s absorption into his textual world is so complete that the flow of script is interrupted only occasionally—by his coworkers’ jostling, for instance, or a sudden gust from a horse’s muzzle. Among the letters, he has chosen certain favorites at whom he laughs and winks: “Certain letters were his favorites, and whenever he came to them he was quite beside himself: he would laugh softly to himself, and wink, and help things along with his lips.”57 Akakii’s intimate, almost flirtatious relationship with these letters reduces man and letter to a single emotional and physical plane; his playful behavior toward them simultaneously breathes life into the printed characters and objectifies the hero, pushing him further into the abstract world of the text. This correspondence is reinforced as letters inscribe themselves on his face while Akakii copies them: “In his face, it seemed, it was possible to read every letter that his quill traced.”58 This plotting of abstraction on flesh indicates an ontological equivalence of man and word (similar to the correspondence between flesh and word in “The Nose”). The unusual emotional connection and physical confluence between man and letter hint at the hero’s psychological position within the alphabet alongside his beloved bukvy; no mere duplicator of letters, he himself is a duplicated letter. Just as Akakii’s pet letters transcribe themselves on his skin, he likewise perceives his own handwriting superimposed on the world outside his texts: “whenever he looked at something, he saw on everything his own clean lines, written out in his even hand.”59 Indeed, the copyist confuses life and letter to the point that he is frequently shocked to find that he is not in the middle of a printed line, but in the middle of a P ­ etersburg 56 Ibid., 144, my emphasis. 57 “Nekotorye bukvy u nego byli favority, do kotorykh esli on dobiralsia, to byl sam ne svoi: i podsmeivalsia, i podmigival, i pomogal gubami” (ibid.). 58 “V litse ego, kazalos’, mozhno bylo prochest’ vsiakuiu bukvu, kotoruiu vyvodilo pero ego”” (ibid.). 59 “Esli i gliadel na chto, to videl na vsem svoi chistye, rovnym pocherkom vypisannye stroki” (ibid., 145).

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liniia (street). This textual assimilation of the hero blurs the line between real and written, leveling human and alphabetic characters and r­ einforcing Akakii’s status as letter.60

“Ia togo . . .”: Akakii’s Verbal Position Akakii is virtually defined by his creative incapacity. Before the narrator conveys any of his hero’s actual speech, we learn that he never responds “a single word” to his office tormentors (143). After dinner, in the hours other clerks dedicate to apparently more verbally creative pleasures—theater, flirtation, gossip, and jokes—Akakii prefers the company of letters he’s purloined from work, which he lovingly traces out for his own collection. When he does wield words, he seems pitifully unable to control their meaning or movement: to rein them in, lash them to some “controlling signifier,” and engage in true, creative communication. As the narrator recounts, “he even had the habit of not finishing his phrases, so that very often he would begin his speech with the words ‘That, really, is altogether sort of . . .’ [Eto, pravo, sovershenno togo ...], after which would come nothing at all, and he himself would forget to go on, thinking that ­everything had been said” (149). When he does attempt to speak, Akakii’s verbal output is confined to prepositions, adverbs, and particles—all parts of speech that bear no independent meaning, empty verbal forms whose 60 “The Overcoat” is hardly the only Gogol text that blurs the boundary between animate and inanimate; in fact, this merging of spirit and matter is a central feature of the Gogolian fictional universe. As we have already seen, body parts perform a grotesque parade down “Nevsky Prospect,” as the street itself yawns into a devouring maw; a nose acquires a rank, dons a uniform, and achieves social substance, while its erstwhile owner loses speech, name, and status, becoming something slightly less than human in his bureaucratic context. Indeed, Gogol’s apparently human characters are often conceived as “inert material” (Fanger, Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 254), no more alive than the souls Chichikov purchases; men and women are reduced to sidewhiskers and sleeves, and at any instant the human face might become a samovar, melon, cucumber, egg, or pancake. Gogol’s very titles hint at this problem of animacy: they call into question the aliveness of the living (and the deadness of the dead), either by taking an inanimate object as hero (“Nevsky Prospect,” “The Nose”) or by confusing the categories entirely (Dead Souls). “The Overcoat” is not even the only text that conflates written and living characters: in Dead Souls, the names of the dead serfs appear to take on life as Chichikov reads them, and in “Diary of a Madman” Poprishchin’s sense of power (he is the king of Ispaniia) derives anagrammatically from his writing (the genitive of pisanie) (Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 129; Gregg, “Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman,’” 444–45). Clearly, this problem of textual/actual, animate/inanimate was a real and enduring one for the author.

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s­ ignificance is determined by context alone. Like the kako at the core of his name, the ­prepositions and particles that compose Akakii’s speech are solely relational, dependent on other, absent words for meaning. In fact, as scholars have detailed, Akakii is in love only with the outward form of words, their material manifestation rather than their abstract function. Unable to wield words to create and convey coherent meaning, Akakii obsesses instead over their “graphic clothing” and “calligraphic reproduction.”61 His job as a copy clerk neatly encapsulates this superficial relationship to language: although he reproduces other people’s words all day, he remains pitifully unable to express his desires or even keep his own words under control. His physical reflection of the letters he copies only reinforces the impression of his own verbal vacuity. In short, Akakii is a consummate copier, immobilized by any hint of verbal invention: even a purely formal adjustment from first- to thirdperson proves unfathomable.62 Initially, at least, Akakii represents verbal form without content, a letter without context—the “raw material” for language, without the means to “mean.” Akakii’s lack of content leaves only an empty form to be filled or controlled by others. Indeed, as Richard Peace and Sergei Bocharov have argued, Akakii finds himself under the verbal control of nearly every other character in the tale; in narrative terms, Akakii cannot tell his own story—he can only be written or “authored” by another.63 His embryonic speech is explicitly contrasted with the verbal authority of various characters, particularly the Important Personage (IP). The bureaucratic function of the IP, of course, relies entirely on the power of his Word: a needy subject must request an audience with him and ask p­ ermission to speak; the personage himself writes letters (spisyvaetsia), the words of which are assumed to give rise to immediate action. In the text, the IP responds to Akakii’s appeal in an abrupt and imposing voice specially contrived to befit his commanding position. He is explicitly associated with verbal power, and his 61 Peace, “Gogol and Psychological Realism,” 72; Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 145. 62 Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 144. 63 For more on how the vacant and vulnerable Akakii falls under the verbal control of each of the tale’s major players—from lowly tailor and lofty general all the way up to the mysterious narrator himself—see Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 145; and S. G. Bocharov, “Pushkin i Gogol’ (‘Stantsionnyi smotritel’’ i ‘Shinel’),” in Problemy tipologii russkogo realizma, ed. N. L. Stepanov and U. R. Focht (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 225–35.

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words invested with a destructive potency: he is “absolutely intoxicated by the thought that his word could deprive a man of his very senses” [sovershenno upoennyi mysl’iu, chto slovo ego mozhet lishit’ dazhe chuvstv cheloveka].64

A Tale of Two Texts: Peter’s Table vs. the Petersburg Text “Everything is infected by imitation”: A Capital of Copiers The IP’s easy domination of the tongue-tied scribe may demonstrate power, but it hardly qualifies him as a verbal creator. In fact, in Peace’s formulation, Akakii “falls victim to one who is also a ‘copier of words.’”65 As scholars frequently note, the IP’s imposing verbal performance is just that: a p­ erformance, complete with dress rehearsals and a script.66 The commanding voice, whose pitch alone is enough to knock Akakii off his feet (“Here he stamped his foot, raising his voice to such an overwhelming note that even someone other than Akakii Akakievich would have been frightened. Akakii Akakievich was stricken: he reeled, shook all over, and was quite unable to stand”), turns out to have been specially contrived and practiced before a mirror for just such an occasion (166–67). And the “content” of his speech, at least among inferiors, is composed almost entirely of memorized phrases, practiced and forcefully repeated. He even clings to a few favorite words, just as Akakii dotingly reproduces his own favorite letters: “His customary conversation with inferiors resounded with strictness and consisted almost entirely of three phrases: ‘How [kak] dare you? Do you know who [s kem] you’re talking to? Do you understand who’s [kto] standing before you?’”67 The very Akakian paucity of the IP’s speech is 64 PSS, 3:167, my emphasis. Clearly, both Petrovich and the IP prize their verbal effekty, designed to render their hearer senseless; but it is important to note that the narrator, too, delights in the verbal sway he holds over his audience: this is, after all, a storyteller who amasses mountains of irrelevant minutiae, diverting his readers from the narrative path, only to get lost in his own vertiginous digressions; who claims not to know certain particulars of his story, all the while filling us in on other, equally “unknowable” details of his hero’s inner life; and who once “absentmindedly” chooses the wrong word (shurin), sending generations of scholars in search of Akakii’s hidden wife. 65 Peace, “Gogol and Psychological Realism,” 72. 66 Woodward, Peace, and Sloane have all commented on the IP’s own oral deficiencies. 67 PSS, 3:165, my emphases.

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h­ eightened by the Kakos that crowd his pet phrases: kak, s kem, kto. These creative limitations—the rote-learned phrases, the mechanical repetition, the linguistic breakdown in certain contexts—accumulate, finally adding up to the ­impression that the IP, whose words carry weight in the P ­ etersburg context, actually “suffers from a verbal poverty not unlike that of Akakii Akakievich himself.”68 Even our narrator, for all his rhetorical brilliance, turns out to be a “copier of words,” pilfering verbal forms from his own heroes, as well as from ­established literary traditions. Certainly, he is as overly reliant on certain beloved slovechki as the IP is on his set phrases or Akakii is on his empty particles;69 he is also clearly familiar with contemporary conventions of narrative, which he attempts to imitate with varying degrees of success (see, for instance, his insistence on introducing each new character with a description, however unnecessary or absurd: “Now that we’ve mentioned the wife, we ought to say a few words about her as well; but unfortunately, not much is known about her, besides the fact that Petrovich had a wife, and that she even wore a bonnet, instead of a kerchief” [148]). He appropriates tropes and techniques from Naturalism, Romanticism, bureaucratic tales, folk literature, and hagiographical tradition, apparently indiscriminately; critics have commented on the disorienting tonal shifts produced as he “tries on” various narrative fashions, ricocheting from an ­official, almost documentary voice to an intimate sentimental one, and instantly back to a flippant anecdotal tone.70 Gavriel Shapiro sees in the “humane passages” evidence of the narrator testing out the “memento mori topos” without an adequate understanding of the concept’s magnitude; as a result, it is reduced to just one more literary cliché.71 Eichenbaum characterizes the narration in general as a brilliant show of mimicry, a “performance, with a pre-established order of gestures and intonations.”72 68 Peace, “Gogol and Psychological Realism,” 71. 69 For more on the parallels between the narrator’s discursive dances and his characters’ vacant verbiage, see Popkin, Pragmatics of Insignificance, 200; and Alissandratos, “Filling in Some Holes,” 24. 70 For a list of studies linking the tale to various trends and schools, from the high literary to the folkloric, see Alissandratos, “Filling in Some Holes,” 22–23; for more on the jarring shifts in narrative tone, see Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, 82. 71 Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque, 166, 129–30. 72 Boris Eichenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” [Kak sdelana “Shinel’”], in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 285. In Eichenbaum’s estimation, the narrator’s skaz is just as contrived as the rest of the characters’, “stylized as a special brand of offhand and naïve chatter” (ibid., 283).

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Given these similarities, it seems natural to speculate whether the speech deficiencies of the narrator might share a common origin with Akakii’s and the IP’s. Merezhkovsky famously described Akakii as “a homunculus sprung from Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, as from an alchemist’s retort,” and a number of critics have since joined him in pointing to the deadening bureaucratic system of chin (rank) to explain the clerk’s condition.73 Indeed, as Sloane and Rancour-Laferriere have observed, Akakii’s verbal idiosyncrasies emerge most prominently in the presence of authority figures, which Sloane diagnoses as a natural side effect of the crushing hierarchical structure of Peter’s Table.74 Undoubtedly, as the practiced phrases and contrived voice demonstrate, the repressive rank system also impedes the speech of the IP. And although we are never explicitly informed of the narrator’s place in the bureaucratic hierarchy of Petersburg, his sensitivity to the finest gradations of chin, coupled with his ­critical attitude toward its social effects, attest to his position somewhere within its ranks.75 Indeed, his own speech seems to run up against a wall whenever he encounters the question of rank; as Graffy details, for instance, his obsessive evasion of the specifics of officialdom leads to an exaggerated generality: “in some town,” “in one department.”76 In essence, the system of ranks renders its occupants formally flawless but creatively hobbled, producing a uniform army, devoid of consequence. Ultimately, the peculiar verbal deficiencies of everyone in this world, from clerk to general—empty imitation, clichéd meaninglessness—are particular to Petersburg: their lack stems directly from the negative creation of the city in the first place, its derivation from Peter’s imitative, ­undivine Word. It should be noted, of course, that within the context of Peter’s city, the IP—no matter how imitative his voice—nonetheless holds social and verbal sway over his subordinates. He is simultaneously victim and enforcer of the status quo. The IP’s relative “significance”—that is, his Petersburg-based power—is maintained through a strict adherence to meaningless order: “He 73 D. S. Merezhkovskii, Griadushchii kham (1906; reprint Moscow: Respublika, 2004), 357; for an excellent summary of this scholarship, see Rancour-Laferriere, Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat, 208. 74 Sloane, “Name as Phonetic Icon,” 482. 75 Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, 104. 76 For more on the narrator’s strained relationship to rank, see ibid., 103–4.

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strived to increase his importance by various means; for example, he ­introduced the rule that inferior officials should be waiting to meet him on the stairs when he arrived at the office (164). When forced to interact with men of a different status, even a single rank lower, the IP maintains silence in order to preserve his own “meaning”: “In his eyes there could sometimes be seen a strong desire to join in some interesting conversation or circle, but he was kept back by the thought [. . .] would he not thereby lose his importance [svoego znacheniia]?”77 Thus, the IP—literally, the “Significant Face” (znachitel’noe litso)—becomes emblematic of the entire, endlessly deferred process of signification in Peter’s city: one gains a degree of significance (and signifying power) through rank but will always remain insignificant (and as “unsignifying” as Akakii) in relation to one’s superiors. Within this world of verbal imitators, a rigid hierarchy persists: Akakii finds himself under the linguistic dominion of higher-ranking copyists who, in turn, merely impersonate those who occupy a more “significant” rung: “Thus is everything in holy Russia infected with imitation, as each man mimics and apes his superior” (164).78 Ultimately, this ladder of verbal influence extends all the way up to the author of the city—that master signifier himself— Peter the Great: the strict bureaucratic grid of his city isolates and imprisons its citizens along discrete lines, reducing them to a set of “characters” bereft of content.79 This Petersburg pecking order bears a striking resemblance to the ­alphabetic chain of command illustrated in the superfluous Izhitsa’s supplications before the powerful Az: even in this abstract empire of letters, it seems, a strict social order is observed. These two hierarchies are analogous structures, both metaphorically and historically: Peter winnowed and reordered the alphabet five years after the foundation of Petersburg; in 1722, spurred on, no doubt, by the same drive toward order and classification, he formed the Table of Ranks, which organized his subjects according to the same principles. And just as Izhitsa has no say over her relative position within the land of Az, 77 PSS, 3:165. 78 This law of imitation extends from the linguistic realm into the bureaucratic, as the occupant of each rung copies his higher-ups; one ambitious low-level clerk even ropes off a tiny “receiving room,” no larger than his desk, for receiving his supplicants. 79 See Woodward (Symbolic Art of Gogol, 96–98) for another interpretation of the hierarchical “boxes” of Peter’s table.

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­ etersburg’s bureaucratic masses have no control over their own semiotic P system—Peter designed and rigidified it, and he still holds power over ­signification. The A-B-C structure of Gogol’s Petersburg reveals the very literal foundations of this struggle for linguistic access, as Peter—the father of both the modern Russian alphabet and the modern bureaucratic hierarchy—­ maintains control over the very building blocks of language and power. This “alphabetic” reading of Peter’s city, in which humans are reduced to characters and manipulated by a single, controlling “author,” is consistent with the logic established in the earlier Petersburg tales of Pushkin and Gogol, according to which the city’s dehumanizing forces are aligned against the individual. As we have seen in Gogol’s previous tales, the city’s constituent sign system includes more than just the Table of Ranks: medals and money, sideburns and styles—in short, anything that denotes significance (one’s “place” and importance within the order)—combine to confer and communicate their wearer’s social position. The result is a self-regulating structure, in which members know their own—as well as their neighbor’s—place: failure to follow form is met with ridicule or a reprimand, while adherence is applauded. The system is like an already-written narrative, which Peter composed, and to which his citizens still conform; unable to deviate from the script already in place, they can only repeat it, over and over. The IP articulates to Akakii a chain of command whose function is to structure this city text, holding each scripted character in his proper place; everything must be done “by the book”: “First of all, you should have filed a ­petition about that in the main office; it would have gone on to the chief clerk, then to the department director, then to my secretary, who would have submitted it to me.”80 In essence, the entire semiotic system of Petersburg—all the collars, copies, and roped-off chambers—serves only to reinforce the pre-existing reality of Peter’s order. The capital, as represented in “The Overcoat,” has become an inert and inflexible text, its strict and well-proportioned gridlines littered with lifeless letters. Each member occupies his own rung, like a letter in a line of script; in a sense, people act as placeholders in the system, dutifully filling their positions until they are replaced by a newer model. Even an element as unexceptional as Akakii is replaced—both in the office (by a “much taller” clerk) and, amusingly, in death (by a “much taller” thief). The Petersburg of “The Overcoat” teems with 80 PSS, 3:166.

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such scripted homunculi, whom Gogol figures as personified letters constituting the tsar’s city text. Akakii is only their most flagrant example, the emblem of these unsignifying signifiers that populate the Russian capital. The seemingly creative preoccupations of Akakii’s fellow-clerks—theater, flirtation, and jokes—require only a script and some practice reciting lines. Even the IP, whose verbal r­ aspekanie, or “verbal roasting,” will nearly reduce Akakii to ashes, is ultimately shown to be nothing more than a higher-level copy clerk.81 Isolated within their own rank, Peter’s subjects exist without context, like meaningless letters removed from their signifying system and doomed to spell out the same texts endlessly. In Gogol’s Petersburg, apparently, occupying a rung in the Table’s ladder renders one more or less unable to signify, to create or determine meaning.

Zhivete, Myslete, Slovo, Tverdo: The Letters Come to Life When read against this narrative of replication, Akakii’s rise from imitator to advocate stands out as a uniquely anti-Petersburgian transformation. Initially, the clerk seems to exist within the text of his documents: literally a Kako begotten from an identical letter Kako. Gradually, however, some of his ­trademark “prepositions and particles” develop into a more assertive style: the scribe attempts to speak up for himself to Petrovich, the sentry, the police commissioner, and finally the IP. Most critics pinpoint the receipt of the o­ vercoat (shinel’) as the turning point in Akakii’s drama, whether they interpret it socially, religiously, or psychoanalytically.82 Peace, for instance, focuses on the social and psychological awakening brought on by his purchase; Anthony Hippisley finds that “the new overcoat symbolizes Christ himself”; and Daniel Rancour-Laferriere discerns a reorientation in Akakii’s sexuality triggered by this garment-wife.83 81 This raspekanie, derived from the familiar root -pek-, is etymologically related to the infernal bakery we encountered in “Nevsky Prospect” and the “baked thing” Ivan Iakovlevich pulled from his roll in “The Nose.” All three highlight the overlap between baked and verbal (or printed) matter in Peter’s city—here, a copier of words is burnt like a pastry by a powerful agent of the state; within a few pages, he will be completely consumed (as the IP’s roasting is completed by fever and hot poultice), forgotten, and replaced by a fresh copier. 82 For a general overview of the various critical readings of the overcoat, as well as its role in Akakii’s transformation, see Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, 99–100. 83 Peace, “Gogol and Psychological Realism,” 73–76; Anthony Hippisley, “Gogol”s ‘The Overcoat’: A Further Interpretation,” Slavic and East European Journal 20, no. 2 (1976): 124–25; Rancour-Laferriere, Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat, 115–17.

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Does the scribe’s union with his “lovely life’s companion” (154) likewise initiate his linguistic transformation? In fact, careful examination of the text reveals that the overcoat actually serves to keep its wearer silent. Early on, following the deterioration of his housecoat, Akakii exhibits signs of verbal creativity: he employs some verbal cunning in his first attempt to sway P ­ etrovich, presenting the threadbare old coat as a new one: “And I’ve sort of come, ­Petrovich . . . that overcoat, you know, the cloth . . . well, you see, everywhere else it’s quite strong; it got a bit dusty and seems old, but it’s new.”84 When he hears the tailor’s estimate, the gentle copyist raises his voice “for the first time since birth” (151), and even returns a week later to plead his case again. Once he has received his new overcoat, however, he seems to retreat back into silence: through the entire eight-page paragraph that spans the life of the overcoat— from its conception at Petrovich’s to its disappearance in the square—Akakii does not utter a single word.85 As soon as he loses the overcoat, however, he instantly regains his voice: immediately following its theft, he erupts into speech, furiously accusing the sentry on duty of sleeping on the job. His ­indictment is the first in a chain of increasingly powerful and original verbal acts, culminating in his postmortem invective. While the hero’s passage from the “official” text of Peter’s bureaucracy into the dynamic free play of signification might appear to be tied up in the figure of the overcoat, his transformation is narratively expressed in terms of his beloved letters. Gogol explicitly incorporates the names of specific Cyrillic letters as such into the story, unambiguously suggesting their embodiment in the story’s hero. In the first draft of “The Overcoat,” the narrator identifies by name exactly which letters etch themselves on Akakii’s face. As the hero playfully greets the letters he encounters in his copying, we see the letters Ж, М, С, and Т ­reproduced on his features as he helps them along with his lips: “So that 84 “A ia vot togo, Petrovich . . . shinel’-to, sukno . . . vot vidish’, vezde v drugikh mestakh, sovsem krepkoe, ono nemnozhko zapylilos’, i kazhetsia, kak budto staroe, a ono novoe” (PSS, 3:150). 85 The narrator does report that the clerk, self-conscious before his overenthusiastic officemates, finally stammers out a disavowal of his acquisition, claiming that it is not new at all, but we don’t actually hear his words. In any case, it is interesting that his sole act of reported speech during this time is to deny the new coat’s existence, as though his verbal activity depended on its absence. Note that his denial constitutes an inversion of the earlier scene at the tailor’s, when Akakii attempted to convince Petrovich of his kapot’s physical integrity; in a period of true verbal growth, it seems, Akakii can invent a coat; in a time of verbal stagnation, he negates one.

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[­sometimes], if you looked, it was possible to read every letter in his face. Zhivete, Myslete, Slovo, Tverdo—all this simply traced and printed itself onto his face. His lips involuntarily tightened and relaxed and [twisted about], as though in some measure helping out” (Так что [иногда] для охотника можно в лице читать бы[ло] всякую букву. Живете, мыслете, слово, твердо—всё это просто рисовалось и отпечатывалось на лице его. Губы его невольно и сжимались и послаблялись и [обраща(лись?)] как будто даже отчасти помогали).86 The names of these letters (loosely translated as Life, Thought, Word, Strength) all represent qualities that the hero lacks; to him they are simply letterforms, meaningless calligraphic shapes, consonant love objects.87 As Vaiskopf astutely points out, the very characters that etched themselves on Akakii’s body in the draft (Ж, М, С, Т, or Живете, Мыслете, Слово and Твердо) reappear together in the final draft, after the hero has lost his housecoat and awaits his new overcoat. In the space of a single paragraph, as the narrator describes the changes that have overcome the hero, three of the letter names resurface in magnified form: Akakii has become more alive, his character firmer, and he is visited by bold thoughts: He became somehow more alive, more determined in character, like a man who has already defined and set himself a goal. Doubt, indecision—in a word, all his hesitant and indefinite qualities—simply disappeared from his face and actions. Fire would occasionally show in his eyes, in his head flashed the most daring and audacious thoughts: and why not put marten on the collar? Он сделался как-то живее, даже тверже характером, как человек, который уже определил и поставил себе цель. С лица и с поступков его исчезло само собою сомнение, нерешительность— словом, все колеблющиеся и неопределенные черты. Огонь порою показывался в глазах его, в голове даже мелькали самые дерзкие и отважные мысли: не положить ли, точно, куницу на воротник?88 86 PSS, 3:447n1, my emphases. Vaiskopf was the first to note the inclusion of these letter names in the draft version of “The Overcoat” (Siuzhet Gogolia, 336–37). 87 It is certainly curious that Gogol chose to remove these letters’ names from the final draft of “Overcoat,” as though they called too much explicit attention to the role of the alphabet in Akakii’s journey. Perhaps, by sweeping Ж, М, С, and Т from his manuscript, the author was trying to hide his tracks, deflect attention from the tale’s alphabetic source. 88 PSS, 3:155, my emphases.

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As Akakii anticipates his new acquisition, these letters seem to penetrate his being—no longer merely printed on him like characters on a page, they now imbue him with their meanings: Life, Strength, Thought.89 It seems that, unlike these other letters, whose names advertise their salient qualities, Kako can claim no discernible personality: it can only replicate—or be like (kak)—its surrounding context. Given the clear lexical correspondences across these two scenes, it is undoubtedly significant that the final letter, Slovo, doesn’t m ­ aterialize in the same capacity or heightened form alongside the other three letter names. While the first three, “zhivee, tverzhe, mysli” refer directly to Akakii and his new, more animated state, the slovom here simply represents the intrusion of one of the narrator’s favorite devices. The absence of proper slova with which to perform these bold mysli implies that, while the hero may have begun his progression toward the Word, he has not yet grasped it. Akakii’s loss of the formless housecoat appears to have triggered a passage from the paper world back to the human world: the letter as black-and-white substitute for real life—Ж is for жизнь—now blossoms into life itself. Left unprotected by the holey housecoat, and not yet in possession of the chic shinel’, the clerk’s empty form begins to fill with borrowed content, as revealed in the animation of the letters Ж, М, and Т on his skin, his sudden embodiment of their meaning (Life, Strength, Thought). Loss may have initiated Akakii’s metamorphosis, but it is language that actually effects it; no sooner has he shed his cotton chrysalis than letters (or rather, the meanings they render)—­performative, meaningful, and alive—rush in to fill the lack. Akakii’s transformation corresponds to a written letter’s shift from empty character (k) to meaningful word: k komu. This transformation, however, will be temporary; with his acquisition of the status-giving overcoat, Akakii will be thrust back into Peter’s textual city, that paper space dominated and delimited by such hollow signifiers of status. And though Akakii’s initial loss has inaugurated the process of signification, he will gain true verbal authority only later, with the greater loss of the overcoat; only then will he step out of “line,” challenge his superiors, and speak beyond the constraints of his own rank.90 89 Vaiskopf, too, notes this shift from “dead letter-outlines” to “Sophianic, living meaning,” reading the transformation alongside Akakii’s own shift in dream object, from “dead letters” to podruga zhizni. In this light, the letters’ new vitality underscores Akakii’s entire ecstatic transformation, which Vaiskopf interprets as a travesty of spiritual ascendance (Siuzhet Gogolia, 336–37). 90 One anonymous reviewer for this chapter suggested that the loss of these outer garments strips Akakii down to a sort of Edenic nakedness, returning him to his divine (Petrine)

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One thread connecting the Overcoat to the Word is suggested by another widely read article by Nadezhdin on orthographic reform, printed in The ­Telescope in 1836, in which he comments on Peter the Great’s desire and failure to control language. Famously contrasting the unalterable Word with an article of clothing, Nadezhdin writes, The sovereign, who demanded that his people display uniformity in all external forms according to the European model, knew that the word alone is not subject to anyone’s orders, that it cannot be shaved off as a beard, or cut off and altered as clothing. He did everything with it that was in his authority: in accordance with his idea, he changed its alphabetic suit [bukvennyi kostium] in the European fashion and left the rest to its own devices!91 Seen in this light, the overcoat appears to symbolize Peter’s doomed endeavor to retain control over the Word—the stylish European outfits in which he revamped and enclosed the letters to demonstrate his verbal authority. Rancour-Laferriere notes that the word shinel’ was a relatively new borrowing from Europe, an apparent corruption of the French chenille which had not yet been fully integrated into the Russian case system; at the time, the garment would have been considered “a European, not a Russian artifice.”92 Nadezhdin’s origins and inspiring his eventual rebellion: a Gogolian parody of the biblical Fall. 91 N. I. Nadezhdin, “Evropeizm i narodnost’ v otnoshenii k russkoi slovesnosti,” Teleskop 31, nos. 1–2 [1836]). Vaiskopf also makes note of this extended metaphor, explaining that word and clothing were conventionally linked in contemporary Russian culture (Siuzhet Gogolia, 335–36); indeed, Lomonosov famously drew on this association between letter and attire in support of Peter’s orthographic reforms: “Under Peter the Great, it was not only the boyars and their wives, but also the letters, who threw off their bulky fur coats and attired themselves in summer dress” (Lomonosov, PSS, 7:391). 92 Rancour-Laferriere, Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat, 48–49. This was exactly the sort of lexical import that opponents of Peter’s project—which had its roots in the Russian orthographical system—had dreaded; in their view, transforming Cyrillic script along Latin lines had initiated a process of contagion that allowed all sorts of foreign terms and exotic spellings to infect the Russian language (Marcus C. Levitt, “The Barbarians among Us, or Sumarokov’s Views on Orthography,” in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenburg, 2004, ed. Roger P. Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli [Berlin: Lit, 2007], 63). Donning this French fashion would seem to represent Akakii’s advance into a “foreign” world of artifice and status; furthermore, in the shift from kapot to shinel’, Akakii sheds a

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striking image of corseting (and thus reining in) the alphabet corresponds to Gogol’s vision of the capital as the tsar’s own frozen and prearranged city text, forever preserving the order he established and formalized. In the critic’s prophesy, however, the tsar’s plan is doomed to remain unfulfilled: Peter may have adorned the alphabet in a new set of clothing, he intimates, but the Word will nevertheless maintain its autonomy. In “The Overcoat,” it is Peter’s spiritual son Petrovich who reenacts the tsar’s role of cutting a new suit for the letter.93 In fact, the overcoat itself is revealed as an oral production, underscoring this connection between the shinel’ and the slovo: “Petrovich then went over each seam with his own teeth, imprinting various patterns with them.”94 The tailor appears to have outfitted Akakii in a coat stitched of letters (the “figures” he produces with his mouth), a garment fairly bursting at the seams with language. Likewise, our first glimpse of the tailor—unsuccessfully guiding a thread into the ukho (ear) of a needle, just as he will soon guide his “verbal effects” into the ear of his unwilling customer—conflates the oral and the sartorial, setting up Petrovich’s enticing threads for verbal interpretation. Petrovich has stitched Akakii into an exterior worthy of Peter’s Table of Ranks, and the clerk’s acceptance of the fashionable overcoat is meant to symbolize his official entry into the Petersburg sign system: the tailor’s solemn cloaking of his client reads like an oddly delayed coming-of-age ritual, where Akakii signals his readiness to enter into Peter’s order; indeed, his makeover recalls the eighteenth-century conversion testimonies of citizens obliged to renounce kako, his ascent into upmarket apparel signaling a readiness to cast off his middling status and move up in the hierarchy of letters. It is important to remember, however, that the old kapot, however shabby, was also a European article, associated with both the French capote (a hooded coat) and the German kaputt (the end, death); ever since Peter threw open his window to the West, apparently, there was no escaping this web of foreign borrowings and miscopyings. 93 According to Rancour-Laferriere, this connection with Peter I was initially suggested in a paper delivered by J. N. Rostinsky at the 1978 Modern Language Association (MLA) conference (Out from under Gogol’s Overcoat, 226). For a detailed analysis of the Peter/Petrovich link, see Woodward, Symbolic Art of Gogol, 102–4; for a discussion of how this sartorial “son of Peter” fits into Gogol’s broader metaphor of Peter as transformer of the Russian national body, see Clint B. Walker’s “Transformation Metaphors in the ‘Soviet Moscow Text’ of the 1920s and 1930s” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2006), 27–31. 94 “Po vsiakomu shvu Petrovich potom prokhodil sobstvennymi zubami, vytesniaia imi raznye figury” (PSS, 3:156).

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their old values and accept Peter’s cultural ­innovations.95 In Nadezhdin’s succinct formula, however, Peter fails to cut the alphabet to order, and instead simply decks it out in a new set of clothes. Indeed, just as the tsar’s plan to shear the Word into shape goes unrealized, Petrovich fails in his own bid to swathe Akakii in a suitable façade: the overcoat is stolen, and the hero is set free to signify for himself.

Buki, Zhivete! A Digression on Dead Text and Living Letters As suggested above, in the fictional world of “Overcoat,” Petersburg itself constitutes a sort of prewritten text, in which humans are reduced to a set of characters in rigid lines. Within this inert narrative context, it is difficult to imagine that Peter, according to the pervasive mythos, once called his city forth in a God-defying act of verbal creation. Such a cosmogonic act, in which the world is created and ordered through divine speech, would appear to represent the paradigmatic example of performative language. In contrast, Peter’s now-­ rigidified order has become passive and dead—and while it still “performs,” each performance is of an empty and meaningless ritual. Peter is hardly interested in returning verbal authority to his subjects, or in reviving the active logocentrism that might return life to this dead narrative; his city text exists to be proclaimed and repeated—never changed, improvised, or reauthored. Thus bereft of a living voice, Petersburg has become a nongenerative text, forever reproducing and pointing back toward itself through repetition, imitation, and a slavish reverence for form. Any hint of creative language is lost, replaced by memorized phrases and endlessly copied-out documents. Ultimately, the ­half-living letters that constitute this text—grotesque products of Peter’s unholy word-become-flesh—epitomize the travesty of the Petersburg ­bureaucratic order.96 95 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 49–51. 96 These “characters” undergo a final loss of identity on entry into the rank system: as the narrator informs us in the very first paragraph, even before he has revealed his hero’s name, “with us, rank must be announced before anything else” (141). This replacement of name by rank reverses the story of Akakii’s original, inglorious overcoat, which is shorn of its name when it loses its form and rechristened a kapot (housecoat); in the bureaucratic order, by comparison, people shed their identity when they don their uniform.

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Akakii humanizes his favorite letters with his winks, breathes life into them with his chuckles, liberating them from the inflexible lines and columns of government forms. Thus viewed against the predetermined text of the city itself, Akakii’s lifelike Buki offer a sort of dynamic, performative countertext to Peter’s ossified one. As we have seen, the revival of interest in the alphabet in the 1820s–30s seems to have inspired Gogol to bring Akakii’s neat script to life, and to allow the copy clerk himself to take his place alongside the living letters he so loves. The concept of letter-as-body began long before the revival of interest in early nineteenth-century Russia, however. Perhaps the most literally ­“performative” of texts are those composed of anthropomorphic or animate letters; Gogol’s revitalization of the alphabet presents “The Overcoat” as a curious example of such “grotesque” writing.97 The ancient tradition of grotesque or anthropomorphic alphabets, which clothe skeletal fonts in flowers and flesh, suggests an ontological basis of letters and writing.98 Before alphabetic symbols, written ideas were primarily conveyed in pictographs or hieroglyphics, ­relatively direct representations of reality.99 In the Middle Ages, alphabetic abstractions quite literally got back to their roots, as the practice of creating letters out of plants, animals, or human bodies became widespread. As symbol and body became one—as letters sprouted leaves or horns—the pages of illuminated medieval manuscripts and early abecedaries burst into bloom, celebrating the rematerialization of the letter. The ascetic copy clerk Akakii, of course, is commonly associated with the figure of the medieval monk, the illuminator of letters.100 The manuscripts he copies may be unholy, but under his hand the letters he duplicates take on life, composing a “diverse and pleasant world” on the page; and as they escape the sheets to alight on their creator’s face

  97 For a fascinating introduction to “grotesque” writing, see Williams, Deformed Discourse, 216–22.   98 Williams describes these grotesque, illuminated letters—the “transmogrification of animal to letter, letter to animal”—in ibid., 216.   99 In their attempts to trace the letters’ roots back to a more concrete signifying system, the scholars D. A. Obleukhov and Orest Evetskii illustrate a widespread nineteenth-century curiosity about hieroglyphics and other early writing systems. See Obleukhov, “Otryvki iz pis’ma”; and Evetskii, “Gipoteticheskii khod.” 100 De Lotto provides one of the most influential readings of “The Overcoat”’s religious sources, presenting Akakii as an obedient, humble novice. See C. de Lotto, “Lestvitsa ‘Shineli,’” Voprosy filosofii, no. 8 (1993): 58–83.

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or fill the air of the capital, they cross the boundary between text and image, returning to their material origins. At their core, anthropomorphic alphabets emphasize the phenomenal dimensions of language, its sensual appeal, while undermining its symbolic ­functions and abstract nature. This reduction of language to its aesthetic features certainly plays out in “The Overcoat,” whose copier-hero is initially enamored with the shape of his script but indifferent to the words’ meaning. But if on one level anthropomorphic alphabets denote an atrophy of meaning, they can also signal a “higher” meaning, beyond conventional signification. As David Williams suggests in his study of the monstrous alphabet, the transformation of letter into body may be read as a liberation of form into life, an emergence from neatly demarcated lines and margins into “living, moving shapes.”101 This deformation of the sign further hints at “the possibility of the transcendence of the limits of discourse, beyond which resides the union of sign and signified.”102 Once freed from its formal limits, the letter is free to assume a performative function: by deforming the abstract, representational sign and embodying another unrelated, but fully realized, meaning, the grotesque letter creates and communicates a new “reality.” Perhaps the living letters of Akakii’s copying provide a key to reading “The Overcoat”: against the backdrop of Petersburg’s endlessly generated ­documents, the letters of the scribe’s manuscripts spring to life. And these inky abstractions are hardly the only words to take on new life in the text—as Peace observes, “The Overcoat” is a story “in which words have a wayward dynamism all their own.”103 Indeed, we find ourselves in a world in which words themselves—rather than plot, characterization, or narrative ­structure—often seem to advance or encumber the action. These vibrant, 101 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 216. 102 Ibid., 222. In such anthropomorphic abecedaria, Williams writes, the letters’ physical transformation may interfere with their abstract representative function. This is reminiscent of the struggles detailed in the fictional “Manuscript of the Deceased Khabarov,” where the middle-aged printer recounts his tearful first encounter with the Cyrillic letters as he tries to decipher the word “angel” with the head-smacking assistance of an impatient instructor: “Азъ нашъ глаголь есть ге, анге, люди еръ, Ангелъ? Что ей казалось такъ легко и понятно, и ясно—для меня было непостижимою загадкою” (Iakovlev, “Rukopis’,” 18). He later quips that the letters of the Russian alphabet—each one conveying its own meaning, unrelated to the words they line up to spell—require “the angelic patience of the tutor and angelic comprehension of the pupil” (35). 103 Peace, Enigma of Gogol, 141.

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i­ rrepressible words represent the flip side of the lifeless, “paper” world remarked on by so many critics; as O’Toole writes, in Gogol’s grotesque universe “names, puns, rumours and reputations become reality and the real is diminished, distorted or magnified to fantastic proportions.”104 The contrast in Gogol’s tale between the dead text of office circulars and the narrator’s dizzying linguistic feats parallels and reiterates the divide in the Petersburg Text between the written texts that glorify Peter’s monumental creation and the oral texts (rumors, legends, prophesies) that simultaneously curse and animate it. It is occasionally difficult to tell who is in charge of the narrative: the narrator or his wayward, runaway skaz. In composing his text, the narrator may try to adhere to convention (even breaking out of the narrative to tell us what “rule” he is about to follow), but his words then seem to escape and head off in a new direction. His introduction of Petrovich might start off appropriately enough (“Of course, not much needs to be said about this tailor, but as it is already an established custom for each character in a story to be fully ­delineated, there’s nothing to be done—let us have Petrovich here as well” [148]), but it quickly drifts off into a discussion of how often the tailor gets drunk on church holidays. Even physically, the narrator’s words appear to take on a life of their own, generating their own tangents or rushing ahead before they can be reined in or given shape. The text is clotted with the material evidence of their joyful insubordination: one single, page-long sentence describes the evening pursuits of seemingly everyone else in the capital, before getting to the narrator’s “point”: Akakii stays inside and copies. And another bursting paragraph swells to eight pages, documenting every event from Akakii’s recognition that he needs a new overcoat through his arrival at the darkened square where it will be stolen. ­Ultimately, critics will continue to disagree on whether the narrator is in control of his narration—is this all a manipulative game? An undisciplined collection of words? Simple incompetence?105 Or, as suggested above, does the narrative, in all its formless magnificence, represent a failed attempt to obey ­convention— to contain the unruly word by donning one narrative trend after another? The narrator might try his best to regulate and imitate, but he cannot; instead, he creates a space in which words seem to wake up, take a deep breath, and head 104 O’Toole, Structure, Style, and Interpretation, 22. 105 For a brief summary of the various critical takes on the narrator and his creation, see Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, 79–84.

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out for a stroll. His creative, playful, and slippery language illustrates both the joys and dangers of such uncontainably performative text. Ultimately, the rushing, uncontrollable narrative of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” particularly when read against Peter’s rigid city text, seems to offer an approach to language as more than just a means of naming and maintaining order but as something that can actively engender—or undo—reality as well. The creative agency of the Word is also playfully underscored by the ­narrator’s double-entendre slovom, which peppers the text (occurring no less than eight times), both lending a familiar, skaz atmosphere to the tale and emphasizing its focus on language through the oblique instrumental sense of the term: by means of the word. The very first sentence of the tale incorporates a slovom, suggesting the expression’s centrality to the significance of the legend. When Akakii acquires the overcoat, his vacillation and indecision, it is suggested, vanish by means of his acquisition of the Word: “Doubt, indecision— in a word, all wavering and uncertain features—disappeared of their own accord from his face and actions.”106 Significantly, the only mention of Peter the Great comes embedded within a typically convoluted Gogolian paragraph containing two repetitions of the device, as though poetically entwining the creator-tsar within the same lively, creative word that once gave birth to his now-fixed city: “In a word, even at that time when all clerks scatter to their friends’ small apartments to play cutthroat whist [. . .], repeating while the cards are being dealt some piece of gossip that had wafted down from high society, something a Russian man can never resist under any circumstances, or even, when there is nothing to talk about, retelling the eternal joke about the commandant who was told that the horse of Falconet’s monument had had its tail docked—in a word, even when everything is striving for diversion—Akakii Akakievich did not give himself up to any such pleasures.”107

“Ne znaete poriadka?” Stepping out of Line Akakii’s emergent embrace of the Word may be traced alongside his shifting relationship to his superiors, those authority figures once in a position to “author” 106 PSS, 3:155, my emphasis. 107 Ibid., 146, my emphases.

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him—that is, to control the signifiers that construe identity. Following his rebuke of the negligent watchman, Akakii demands and receives a meeting with the police commissioner; these verbal appeals, so far removed from the incomprehensible stuttering of the past, indicate the clerk’s evolution beyond “authored” status into authoritative signification. Akakii finally moves on to his disastrous audience with the IP. With his insignificant appearance and unintelligible speech—face to face with this Significant “Face,” he has reverted to stammering, “with the addition of even more frequent ‘ums’ and ‘ers’”—Akakii cuts a profoundly unthreatening figure.108 Nonetheless, by appearing in person rather than on paper before the IP— by failing to follow the paper trail—Akakii signals a brazen willingness to circumvent the “chain of chin” so carefully i­temized by the general.109 Like a letter’s independent advancement up the alphabetic ranks, or even out of the alphabetic order altogether, Akakii’s sidestep “out of line” profoundly ­jeopardizes the established hierarchy. On a metatextual level, by leaving the tidy lines of “official” language and attempting to enter the realm of living, creative language, Akakii represents a threat to Peter’s order. The IP is outraged by this breach of form and delivers his raspekanie with the clear intent to incinerate this disruptive paperand-ink upstart. Having lost this challenge over the creative Word, Akakii once again appears to be at the mercy of others’ language. The IP’s blistering rebuke gives rise to a burning fever; a doctor arrives just in time to examine the delirious clerk, then loudly prescribes a hot poultice and a coffin. “Had Akakii Akakievich heard these fateful words [rokovye dlia nego slova] spoken?” muses the narrator following the doctor’s fatal diagnosis, suggesting that it is the verdict of impending death—in other words, language itself—that brings about the patient’s final demise.110 Gogol’s choice of “scorching” his hero could hardly be accidental:111 the narrator eventually directs so much heat at Akakii that even the IP feels compunction for the “poor, burnt-to-ashes” clerk he’s just raked over the coals (171). The emphasis on burning turns out to be part of a larger pattern; ­paradoxically, the northern frost also thoroughly “bakes” its victims: “For some 108 “S pribavleniem dazhe chashche, chem v drugoe vremia, chastits ‘togo’” (PSS: 3:166). 109 Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, 104. 110 PSS: 3:168, my emphasis. 111 A raspekanie literally denotes an “all-over baking.” Gogol repeats the -pek- root seven times in the tale: three raspekaniia, plus four verbal variations. Woodward also surveys this burning motif, translating the IP’s reprimands as “comprehensive bakings” (Symbolic Art of Gogol, 97).

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time, Akakii Akakievich had begun to feel that his back and shoulders were somehow being seared particularly vigorously” (Akakii Akakievich s n­ ekotorogo vremeni nachal chuvstvovat’, chto ego kak-to osobenno sil’no stalo propekat’ v spinu i plecho).112 As Woodward has suggested, Akakii’s blasted, hemorrhoidal complexion bears the traces of the city’s relentless scorching.113 It appears that the infernal city and its agents—both human and natural—keep the ­population in place by systematically searing those perceived as a threat to the established order.114 And since the residents of this textual world are composed of paper and ink, they are highly flammable: easily immolated by stinging frosts, smoke, high temperatures, and even heated words. The process of incinerating Akakii begun by the relentless frost is continued by the IP’s scalding/scolding (“Never in his life had he been given such a strong roasting [tak sil’no raspechen] by a general”); the fever it ignites (“na drugoi den’ obnaruzhilas’ u nego sil’naia goriachka”); and the warming priparka prescribed by the doctor.115 This northern inferno thus holds its captives in check, its flames a mortal threat to the combustible characters that fill out its liniia—that is, the ranks of subjects so easily consumed by the flames of their higher-ups. The IP’s fire arrives too late to annihilate Akakii, however: although the clerk returns home hushed and wordless, seemingly demoted back into meaninglessness (“He dragged himself home, lacking the strength to say a single word”), he soon erupts into fullblown language, cursing the IP in a rush of terrible, uncontrollable words: “his little old landlady even crossed herself, never having heard anything like this from him before, especially as the words immediately followed ‘Your Excellency.’”116 For the first time since the early description of Akakii’s meaningless speech patterns, the narrator refers explicitly to Akakii’s own words: “Finally, he even began to curse, pronouncing the most terrible words.”117 With this reference, Akakii has finally succeeded in following all of his favorite copied-out letters—Zhivete, 112 PSS, 3:174, my emphases. 113 Woodward, Symbolic Art of Gogol, 100. 114 The hellish “heat” of this frozen city is, of course, consistent with its demonic associations in the popular imagination and in other Gogol tales, such as “Nevsky Prospect.” For more on the city’s “infernal” origins and character, see Toporov, PTRL, 47–48. 115 PSS: 3:167; priparka (poultice) derives from the root par-, or “steam.” All emphases mine. 116 PSS: 3:167, 168. All emphases mine. 117 “Nakonets, dazhe skvernokhul’nichal, proiznosia samye strashnye slova” (ibid., 168), my emphasis.

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Myslete, Tverdo, and now Slovo—off the page and into life. He now embodies a heightened form not only of the first three (zhivee, tverzhe, and mysli), but of the word (the plural slova), as well. This end-of-life union with the Word metaphorically completes his vivification; that is, while he “gives up the ghost” in Peter’s text, he will be resurrected in the other, living text of “The Overcoat.” This embodiment of the “living letters” also explains why Akakii did not fall silent with his metaphorical combustion. His assimilation of the letters’ meaning—life, thought, strength, and now the Word—means that he is no paper prisoner of Peter’s textual world: he has gained meaning. By all rights, the IP’s blistering rebuke should have obliterated him—had Akakii remained an empty letterform, his superior’s scolding would have burnt him to a crisp; instead, the emancipating blaze merely scalds the hero’s coating, leaving his newly acquired essence exposed but still intact. Ironically, the IP’s “roasting” appears to have contributed to Akakii’s spiritual (or, in this case, verbal) ­resurrection. Earlier, as Akakii awaited his overcoat, we saw in his eyes the first glimmers of something resembling vitality—alongside the reflected Life, Strength, and Thought, a fire had begun to smolder within him (“Fire would occasionally show in his eyes”). On donning the overcoat, however, this fledgling flame was smothered—the thick quilting of Petrovich’s conventional suit acts as an extinguishing blanket, snuffing out the first flicker of creativity and insulating against any hint of language. The IP’s raspekanie, however, amounts to a fiery “baptism,” inadvertently rekindling in Akakii an eruption of crude words; the former copier will finally rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes to deliver a verbal raspekanie of his own. Read as the realization of the alphabet motif, Akakii’s deathbed curses represent a rebirth into language. These curses, however, can hardly be considered coherent, meaningful language—they are, rather, like the furious cries of a newborn. It is hardly surprising, then, that the process of language acquisition continues in the afterlife, when the scribe is “reborn” as a corpse; the next time he opens his mouth, his speech to the IP is intimidating and significant: “A-ha, so it’s finally you! Finally I have you, er, by the collar! It’s your overcoat I need! You didn’t trouble yourself about mine, and even gave me a roasting—now hand yours over!”118 Although a certain 118 “‘A! tak vot ty nakonets! nakonets ia tebia togo, poimal za vorotnik! tvoei-to shineli mne i nuzhno! ne pokhlopotal ob moei, da eshche i raspek—otdavai zhe teper’ svoiu!’” (ibid., 172).

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unshakable verbal marker (togo) ­identifies the corpse as the same stuttering scribe, Akakii’s language has now become powerful and effectual: the insistent imperfective imperative he levels at his victim (hand yours over!) meets with immediate compliance. More ­significantly, following the encounter, the IP undergoes a scaled-down ­transformation of his own, uttering his memorized threats with slightly less frequency. In a word, Akakii’s once-senseless speech has finally achieved both meaning and performativity: he has gained a sort of rival Word to challenge and transform the fixed Petersburg order. In alphabetic terms, the hero Kako has finally arrived at the Slovo so long beyond his reach.

The Letters, from Kako to Slovo At root, “The Overcoat” represents a unique artistic transformation of the heated alphabet polemics of the 1820s and 1830s. By setting his tale within the space of the alphabet, Gogol was able to obliquely treat issues of authority and language central to all of his Petersburg stories, and particularly to this, the cycle’s final tale. Where the authors of the orthographic debates brought their endangered letters to life, however, Gogol performs an inverse transformation, demoting his hero to the status of letter; in his vision of Petersburg, the bureaucratic masses are ­flattened into alphabetic characters, crowding the fourteen steps of Peter’s Table of Ranks like lettering on lines of text. In this alphabetic reading of “Overcoat,” the hero Akakii is figured as an individual letter, deprived of both content and context, and therefore unable to signify—as such, he ­epitomizes the verbally vacant, easily dictated subjects of Peter’s bureaucratic order. In Gogol’s Petersburg, the tsar’s revised alphabet—like the characters that populate his Table—is revealed as nothing but a hierarchy of forms, draped in Western fashion. Interpreted against the verbal and sartorial pageantry of i­mperial Petersburg, the overcoat is just one more fancy façade within a form-obsessed society: just as Peter’s orthographic reforms adorned the letters in a fancy European wardrobe, Petrovich has fashioned a modish shinel’ for the empty letter Kako. Akakii’s dramatic transformation—his alphabetic ­realization—is precipitated by the loss of his own “calligraphic clothing”: first of the housecoat, then of the overcoat, so strongly associated with the outer

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form of language. The chain of loss in the tale—of housecoat, overcoat, life— accompanies a gradual shift from form to content: Akakii leaves the abstract world of convention and is reborn into a new world of meaning. As numerous scholars have detailed, Gogol witnessed—and participated in—the birth of modern Russian authorship. His career bloomed at a time of unprecedented change in Russian literary culture, a period defined by expanding literacy, an explosion in print culture, a proliferation of written texts, and the development of a professional writing class.119 As the center of literary life moved beyond the salon, with its chummy relationship between the author and his elite readers, a new readership emerged: not the uniform, urbane salon a­ udience of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but a “broad, heterogeneous, far from uniformly sophisticated” group.120 These new literary circumstances brought concomitant hazards, both artistic and commercial: how could a professional man of letters continue to serve his muse, while s­ atisfying this new, unknown, multifarious audience? And how was an e­ mergent author to square the “high mission of art with the profit motive of the market economy”?121 These tensions between poet and crowd, art and commerce, contributed to an apprehension that the mass duplication of texts would lead to a debasement of literary values. This shifting literary scene played out against a larger crisis of national identity: early nineteenth-century writers and critics lamented, in N ­ adezhdin’s words, the “general void and barrenness” of Russian literary life, and sought to identify a unique national voice.122 As Russians struggled with their cultural belatedness and status as imitators, copying became a central 119 For more on Gogol and the emergence of print culture in Russia, see William Mills Todd’s chapter on literary institutions in Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (45–105); Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-­Century Russia and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–31; Donald Fanger, “Gogol and His Reader,” in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914, ed. William Mills Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 61–95; Fanger, Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 35–44; and Moeller-Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife, 15–33. For a discussion of authorship in the early nineteenth century, see also David Glenn Kropf, Authorship as Alchemy: Subversive Writing in Pushkin, Scott, Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: S­ tanford University Press, 1994). Kropf examines the institution of authorship in the Romantic era and the various subversive strategies adopted by several authors (including Pushkin in his early prose period) in the pursuit of literary freedom. 120 Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art, 36. 121 Moeller-Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife, 17. 122 Ibid., 7.

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concern for Gogol and his fellow writers.123 Anne Lounsbery astutely suggests that Gogol’s p­ reoccupation with copying was “an effort to revalue [Russia’s] cultural lateness and the acts of imitation that result from it.”124 Interpreted along these lines, the figure of Akakii emerges as Gogol’s ­ambivalent response to the rise in print culture, with the clerk’s p­ roliferating letters standing in for the era’s proliferation of printed texts, that endless replication and imitation of artistic artifacts. Perhaps the copyist represents Gogol’s attempt to address the threat to author and art posed by the rise of print culture, and to “revalue” the artistic ­degradation of the print marketplace; after all, Akakii is a contented and capable copier who learns to raise his voice “for the first time in his life.” At the same time, Akakii betrays his creator’s anxiety apropos artistic imitation: the face of a copy clerk obscured by his own multiplying letters becomes emblematic of Gogol’s own artistic insecurities—the creator dissolving behind his own derivative p­ roduction, gaining authority only at the expense of his life. Expanding this argument onto a broader stage makes it clear that the specific anxieties surrounding the changing culture of authorship of the 1820s and 1830s also help explain why the alphabet craze spoke so loudly to Gogol and his fellow writers during this period. The two debates shared an identical time period and cast of characters, as well as a similar subject: the means and production of literary creation. It is possible that the shifting terrain of the literary landscape and the unstable social position of the writer led these authors to identify with the ­imperiled superfluous letters, moving them to speak up on their behalf. If mass publication offered writers a broader readership, it simultaneously seemed to 123 Scholars have long noted that Gogol “made lavish appropriations of themes, ideas, and styles from his predecessors. His works alone would enable us to deduce much of the history of Russian literature, along with its borrowings from the West” (Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 168). On a more personal level, the young author inflated the extent of his indebtedness to Pushkin, naming the older poet as his inspiration and guide, and claiming to have inherited from him the outlines of both Dead Souls and The Inspector General (Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 111–12; Moeller-Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife, 7). In effect, Gogol posed as a copier in order to legitimize his position as author. Throughout his career, meanwhile, he displayed apprehension over his art’s perceived derivativeness, going out of his way to assert his uniqueness in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends; as Maguire summarizes, “As late as 1847 [. . .] we see evidence of a persistent anxiety about what we have called imitation” (Exploring Gogol, 168). 124 Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art, 264.

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upend the power balance between author and reader; the struggle to understand and satisfy a new reading audience was attended by a psychological loss of “authorship.” In the face of this revolution in print culture, writers may have followed a conservative impulse to protect the “raw material” of their craft; defending Izhitsa thus became a reaction against the uncertainties of print, a way to reinstate the authority that had shifted from poet to crowd.125 Certainly, in the case of “Overcoat,” it is the tongue-tied Akakii’s intimate relationship with these letters that rescues him, sparking an evolution from copier to creator. The animation of his beloved, duplicated buki—their ­penetration from his skin to his soul—instills in Akakii the content and m ­ eaning-making capacity that he earlier lacked. Here the task of the titular councilor is cast as an analogue of the writer’s activity: at some point in the mysterious process, duplication leads to true creation.126 Gogol viewed copying as a vital part of his own creative process and claimed to recopy his stories eight times: “only after the eighth rewrite—and always in my own hand—does the work take on a final artistic finish and become 125 As an interesting side note, it is worth comparing the peculiar fetishization of Cyrillic characters in the 1820s and 1830s with the orthographic crazes of other eras. On the whole, the literature of embodied letters seems to proliferate in the decades following major orthographic reform. In the eighteenth century, the convention of personifying alphabet characters was likely a reaction to Peter’s all-encompassing reforms, the orthographic and bureaucratic branches of which were twined in the public imagination. With literary ­luminaries like Lomonosov and Sumarokov weighing in on opposing sides of Peter’s civil script, the “alphabetic” works by Lomonosov, Fonvizin, and Kantemir read like a literary extension of their responses to the Petrine revolution. (For an account of Sumarokov’s antireformist position, see Levitt, “Barbarians among Us,” 53–67; for Lomonosov’s more congenial view of the Petrine reforms, see above.) The decades following the revolution of 1917 likewise saw a renaissance of living alphabet characters, as writers responded to the socio-orthographic engineering: in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We (1921), the citizens of the totalitarian OneState are identified by a mix of Cyrillic and Latin letters, and in Iurii Tynianov’s Lieutenant Kizhe (1927), a spelling error is conferred rank and lives out an eventful existence in the Russian bureaucracy. The absence of a precipitating orthographic event in early nineteenth-century Russia suggests that the movement may have arisen, rather, in response to events in the political or cultural sphere. This notion is consistent with the reading presented here, in which authorial angst over changes in the literary culture of the day found reflection in this war over letters (which represent, after all, the very building blocks of literary production). 126 This connection between the scribe and his creator is reinforced alphabetically: as one anonymous reviewer for The Russian Review pointed out, the double K of Akakii (ka-ka) recalls the acoustic duplication (go-go) at the heart of the author’s family name; also note that, phonetically, K represents the unvoiced counterpart of the voiced letter G.

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a pearl of creation.”127 Eventually, Gogol’s letters take on a life of their own, empowering both themselves and their author: “In the process you will notice that as your style gains in power and your sentences take on polish and refinement, your hand will also seem to grow stronger: the letters will be set down more firmly and decisively” (bukvy staviatsia tverzhe i reshitel’nee).128 Likewise, Akakii’s lovingly reduplicated letters awaken and reinforce their maker: they fly from their manuscripts, fill the musty air of the capital, and finally etch themselves on the body of their creator, strengthening his character (On sdelalsia . . . dazhe tverzhe ­kharakterom);129 their flight from folio to freedom shows Akakii a passage out of the textual prison he inhabits. In alphabetic terms, Akakii’s verbal progress represents the letter Kako’s break with the “chain of signifiers” that composes the barren alphabetic order established and controlled by Peter; the “living letters” lead him out of f­ormation and down the alphabetic path, from Zhivete through Myslete and all the way down toward Tverdo, where he lands, finally, at Slovo. This alphabetic education enables him to “break form,” speak beyond his designated rank, and access the authoritative Word held and withheld by the tailor-tsar. The once-empty letter K has stepped out of line, transcended the rigid hierarchy, and united with the S it sought all along; in physical death, Akakii has finally advanced k slovu.

127 Reported in the 1872 memoirs of N. V. Berg, “Vospominaniia o N. V. Gogole, 1848–1852,” Russkaia starina 1, no. 5 (1872), http://www.bibliotekar.ru/reprint-68/4.htm. Translation from Dmitry Chizhevsky, “About Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, 298. 128 Chizhevsky, “About Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” 298, my emphasis. 129 PSS, 3:155, my emphasis.

Conclusion

Beyond the Schism

Peter’s Word as Wound Over three hundred years have passed since Peter the Great called his new capital into existence, but the literary aftermath of his monumental achievement is still preserved in the pages of the Petersburg Text. The tsar’s own literary descendants—characters whose very Word has the power to take on flesh (or at least to prompt immediate fulfillment by their terrified subordinates)—reign over the tales of Pushkin, Gogol, and their successors in the Petersburg tradition, from the Bronze Horseman and the Important Person to Apollon Ableukhov, whose thoughts become incarnate in the spectral world of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. And in the shadow of these virile authorities cower their metaphorical “sons”: petty clerks, officers, and other low-ranking occupants of the Table of Ranks who aspire to inscribe themselves into the dominant socio-cultural system. These literary offspring are hardly identical: some, like Evgenii and Akakii, appear incapable of controlling language or the other social signifiers at their disposal; others, like Germann, Pirogov, and Kovalev, succeed (or nearly succeed) in manipulating the sign system to their own advantage, climbing the rungs suspended by Peter. And these narratives of authority and advancement are not the only remnants of Peter’s creative act: as petrified clerks come to life (Evgenii’s transformation from parodic horseman to rebel) or striving officers are arrested in their tracks (Germann is “petrified” at the moment he is to receive the empowering cards), matter itself appears to awaken,

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as though reenacting the tsar’s animation of a new cosmos. This literal animation of inert flesh as playing cards wink and body parts promenade down Nevsky Prospect reflects and emphasizes the verbal “animation” (or deanimation) of Peter’s human subjects. At the heart of this drama of animation—as mild clerks learn to speak up, scrambling officers miss their footing, and Bronze Horsemen leap from their pedestals—lies a struggle over creative language: who controls it, whom they control, and how this system of verbal authority is reinforced or subverted in Peter’s imperial capital. The well-attested veneration of the poetic word in Russian society is a relatively recent development: the logos assumed its privileged position at the center of Russian cultural life only in the early nineteenth century, right around the time that Pushkin took up his quill. Traditional Orthodoxy had discouraged verbal creation, encouraging a passive relationship to the written word, which was understood to constitute but one path to divinity, no higher than the holy image or the ringing of bells. Under Peter, though, the state reoriented traditional cultural values toward the West, exerting control over the Church, rending icon from word, and elevating the status of the logos. Peter pruned the Church Slavonic language, shearing off superfluous letters, simplifying syntax, and finally styling a flexible and accessible new written language, capable of enacting and promoting all of his world-building projects, from constructing a navy and restructuring the bureaucracy to importing European foods, fashions, and philosophical traditions. The city of St. Petersburg became not only the new capital but a glittering emblem of Peter’s Western pivot. The city was known by many names in its first century: before its official title stuck, it was Petropol’; in Peter the Great’s private correspondences, it was paradiz; and in the odic tradition of the eighteenth century, poets imagined it now as Rome, now as Venice, and finally as the “Northern Palmyra.” Beneath these high-flown literary panegyrics, however, simmered an oral tradition of rumors and prophesies linking the unnatural city of Piter with flood, destruction, and death. By the early nineteenth century, the creative Russian word—specially refashioned for the facilitation of Peter’s reforms—had been adopted by a new generation of poets, who married the odic to the oral to create a new literary tradition of the city. Under Pushkin and Gogol, Peter’s once-resplendent city became dark and despotic, fragmentary and explicitly demonic. These authors did not limit their attack to the city,

Conclusion

however—their texts, which formed the foundation of what would eventually become a monumental Text of the city, inscribe an authorial challenge to the city’s own visionary “author,” beginning with a clerk’s fist raised against the monument to Peter. The theme of competition between creator and subject (and the linguistic origins and consequences of that competition) has biblical precedent in the two falls described in Genesis: the first from the unity of Eden, the second from the unity of the Logos.1 The story of the Fall details man’s original challenge to God’s word, “with a resulting subversion of established tradition and authority in Paradise.”2 God commands Adam not to eat from the tree of life, delineating the verbal hierarchy of Paradise (God >Adam > Eve); this order is reversed and destabilized when Eve is seduced by the cunning words of the serpent, and she undertakes a similar oral seduction of Adam, by fruit and by voice. In punishment for his desire to “be like God” (3:4), mankind is expelled from the garden and loses contact with the divine. The Babel story resumes and amplifies this narrative of linguistic rivalry and rebuke. God had originally passed his divine, creative Logos to Adam, who extended it into the world, reenacting “the nominalist mechanism of creation” as he named “each living creature” (2:19).3 Even after the Fall, mankind was united by this same sacred syntax until, hoping to “make a name” for themselves, they built a tower with its top “in the heavens” (11:3); the Lord, threatened by the unlimited capabilities of a unified mankind, descended to scatter them and “confuse their language so that they will not understand each other” (11:7). The typical plot of the early Petersburg text bears a striking resemblance to these biblical models: a subject appropriates the logos, either in direct challenge to Peter (as in Evgenii’s confrontation with the Bronze Horseman) or in a bid to gain a foothold in the city’s signifying system. His infraction is met with punishment, either directly by the tsar or through one of his many stand-ins, and the pretender-to-the-word is expelled from Peter’s creation.   1 In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), the literary critic George Steiner famously treats Babel as “a second Fall” (61).   2 Eric Jager, The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2. Jager’s fascinating study analyzes the Fall as a profound influence on Western medieval ideas on language and literacy.   3 Steiner, After Babel, 61.

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This contest over language and representation plays out again and again in the early nineteenth-century literature of Peter’s city. I have suggested that this focus on the word, and the heated struggle it inspires between “significant” and “insignificant” members of Peter’s order, stems from the verbal origins of the city itself: its legendary foundation by word, its rise concomitant with that of the freed logos. The authors’ apparent drive to obsessively revisit and textually represent this originating verbal contest—which generally results in the death of those subjects who manage to attain any level of signification—might be fruitfully examined in light of trauma theory. Trauma theory examines the relationship between words and traumatic experience, inviting us to “read” a culture’s wounds through its literary artifacts. The systematic study of trauma and its representations is rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud’s earliest formulation, from Studies in Hysteria (1895), conceived trauma as an overwhelming and disturbing experience which, initially repressed, returns in the form of some physical symptom or compulsive behavior.4 Later, in Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud endeavored to articulate a broader theory of trauma that construes the development of culture in terms of collective trauma and its repression, compulsive repetition, and memory. As the traumatic initial experience is necessarily lost and “forgotten,” trauma theory emphasizes rather the representation of the event, allowing for “an interpretation of cultural symptoms—of the growths, wounds, scars on a social body, and its compulsive, repeated actions.”5 Its primary concerns with history, representation, and memory make trauma theory an ideal critical framework for the study of the Holocaust and other “unimaginable” cultural or historical events. The approach rose to prominence in literary criticism in the 1990s, with the publication of Cathy Caruth’s seminal study Unclaimed Experience. Some theorists warn that the natural opposition between catastrophic experience (which resists representation) and narrative may lead to distortion, foregrounding the problems and limits of representation; Berger has characterized trauma theory as a “discourse of the unrepresentable, of the event or object that destabilizes language and demands a vocabulary and syntax in some sense incommensurable with what went before.”6 There is also the danger that   4 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 1–17.   5 James Berger, “Trauma and Literary Theory,” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 3 (1997): 573.   6 Ibid.

Conclusion

narrative might neutralize the primal agony of trauma; as Caruth writes, “the danger of speech, of integrating into the narration of memory, may not lie in what it cannot understand, but in that it understands too much.”7 Despite these caveats, however, many theorists regard literary fiction as an important site for the symptomatic reenactment of cultural trauma, exposing the complicated relationship between trauma and text or, as Caruth puts it, “the wound and the voice.”8 In the late eighteenth century, William Blake composed a visionary critique (or parody) of the Book of Genesis, titled The Book of Urizen, reimagining creation as the original trauma: a sort of prelapsarian “fall” that split man and cosmos from the unity of pre-cosmogonic chaos: Sund’ring, dark’ning, thund’ring, Rent away with a terrible crash, Eternity roll’d wide apart, Wide asunder rolling; Mountainous, all around Departing, departing, departing, Leaving ruinous fragments of life, Hanging, frowning cliffs, and, all between, An Ocean of voidness unfathomable. (lines 94–103)9 In the literature of the early nineteenth century, the founding of Petersburg (and the era of Peter’s reforms more generally) is similarly represented as the primary traumatic event of modern Russian culture. Peter’s new capital, like the fallen universe of Blake’s Urizen text, presents a parodic cosmos, created in the image of its own godlike idol and characterized primarily by division and darkness. If the poetic text presents a unique locus for the cultural reenactment and transformation of trauma, perhaps Pushkin and Gogol engage in the obsessive reiteration of the father’s “crime”—the radical Western turn, the rending of word from image, the violent uprooting of traditional culture—specifically in   7 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 154.   8 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice,” in Unclaimed Experience. 1–10.   9 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, 1794, http://www.bartleby.com/235/259.html.

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order to represent (and thus awaken cultural memory of the “unrepresentable”). By writing, altering, and rewriting the drama, the authors gradually transfer power to the son, encoding verbal challenge in their oppressed characters (and a measure of vulnerability in their Horsemen and IPs). Even more radically, they seem intent on bridging the gap rent by the Petrine reforms in the cultural landscape: their texts variously reinscribe a state of unity between man and nature (as in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman) or image and word (as in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect”), as though to reintegrate these sundered elements and thus destabilize Peter’s created order.

The Petersburg Text and Its Possibilities With the 1833 composition of both The Bronze Horseman and “The Queen of Spades,” Pushkin became the primary architect of what would eventually be recognized as a new literary tradition of St. Petersburg. The poet’s eager and ambitious protégé Gogol inherited and elaborated his master’s vision in a series of five tales which were not conceived as a cycle, but which were written in dialogue both with one another and with Pushkin’s own literary reflections on the city: “Nevsky Prospect” and “Notes of a Madman” (1835), “The Nose” (1836), “The Portrait” (1835, 1842), and “The Overcoat” (1842). Together, these tales are widely recognized as the foundational works in what has become known to critics as the Petersburg Text: a corpus of individual texts that develop the myth and image of St. Petersburg, later theorized by Vladimir Toporov and other twentieth-century structuralists as a single text. Toporov’s construct is rooted in the peculiar dualistic mythos that grew up around Peter’s newborn city, in which the miracle of creation coexists with the promise of destruction; despite a richly developed (and officially promoted) panegyric tradition praising the new capital, the apocalyptic mood clung like an oral residue, in the form of legend, rumor, and prophesy. According to Toporov, the Petersburg Text plots a path from one pole of the myth to the other: from death to rebirth, from sin to moral salvation. If Toporov’s scheme can be understood as the path to salvation, my own can be seen as a quest for reunion. My own analysis focuses on the verbal basis of the Petersburg Text: the city’s birth in the oral Word of Peter (echoed in his legendary Zdes’ byt’ gorodu); its literary birth in the tension between its written

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and oral annals (inscribed in Pushkin’s “Zdes’ budet gorod”); the textual preoccupation with the city’s powerless subjects and the verbal challenges they issue to their creator (reiterated in Evgenii’s uzho). The paradigm corresponds in some ways to Toporov’s: in each, something “bad” (Peter’s creation, his petrified new Word) offers a circuitous route to something “good”: a sort of rebirth, be it moral or spiritual (here, represented linguistically). While I adopt the linear structure offered by Toporov’s model, however, my analysis diverges from his in its focus on the particularly linguistic nature of Petersburg’s oppositions and salvation drive. Shifting the spotlight from the moral to the verbal illuminates several key moments in the Petersburg myth: Peter’s subversion of the natural order with his “creation by word”; the poets’ inscription of their own rival word in representing their rebellious heroes; the fictional struggle they describe between creator and creature over the authoritative word; and finally, the linguistic “space” of their heroes’ evolution, from incoherence through verbal rebellion, punishment, and (sometimes) the final attainment of a powerful new logos. This struggle for verbal authority—the ability to signify oneself and “author” one’s surroundings—is the primary drive of the ­Petersburg Text, the means by which that which has been torn asunder can be made whole again. Peter’s new order affected more than just the physical city of Petersburg; in textual terms, the tsar created an entire new sign system, where the process of signification is controlled by words—titles and ranks, circulars and edicts— and conveyed by inhuman objects: here, medals, overcoats, uniforms, and sidewhiskers are not so much functional as they are semiotic, serving to confer their wearers’ status. The Table of Ranks and petty hierarchies of this symbolic metropolis intersect to produce a grid as inflexible as the linii of the physical city underlying it. Not all of the Petersburg Text heroes follow an identical trajectory through the city’s standardized system of signs, but all of them are forced to confront and respond to the same issues of language and authority. In essence, there are two “paths” of development open to the inhabitants of Peter’s stone city: assimilate and ascend, or rebel and take up a position outside the power structure. In the five stories under examination, three characters choose the former approach, and two choose the latter. “The Queen of Spades,” “Nevsky Prospect,” and “The Nose” each feature heroes who conform and climb the rungs of power, either by accumulating bits

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and pieces of the signifying system (Kovalev’s very existence depends on the accrual of such signifiers of power as fashionable sideburns, seals, and, of course, the unearned title “Major”), or by bypassing the rungs altogether, as Germann attempts to do. Major Kovalev and Lieutenant Pirogov present a comical counterweight to the tragic, alienated clerks of the city’s early literature: where Evgenii had challenged the dominant power structure of Petersburg, Kovalev is intent, rather, on clinging to the mid-level rung of power he has achieved on the tsar’s Table of Ranks. Where the first little clerk of the tradition achieved something like a rival logos—transcending the city’s strict hierarchical grid to attain his own challenging word—the Major is content to remain within it, slowly accumulating the petty trinkets and badges of power, hoping only to reach a slightly higher rung. Similarly, the just-promoted Pirogov proves to be the ­ultimate assimilator, an indiscriminate consumer of everything from street ­literature to (presumed) streetwalkers in his carefree—and relatively painless— ascent through the ranks of this consumerist and all-consuming society. Pushkin’s Germann, like the Gogolian buffoons who would follow him, is not so much a victim of Peter’s reforms as he is a beneficiary, a sort of spiritual “heir” of the tsar. As in Kovalev’s farce, Germann’s dramatic rise and fall lays bare the workings of the new semiotics of Peter’s city, as signifiers of status (titles, names, fortunes) are stolen and manipulated by hungry outsiders. The new, postPetrine order—the Table of Ranks, the possibility for step-by-step advancement, the strict rules governing the system—is emblematized in an officers’ game of faro, at which Germann endeavors to confound the rules of advancement— using cards that symbolically encode the overturning of Petersburg’s 1703 creation—to reach a status beyond his historic station. Bracketing these ambitious conformists, the tradition-opening The Bronze Horseman and Gogol’s final tale “The Overcoat” both feature rebellious clerks who raise their voices (and even a clenched fist) against the agents of hierarchy. The hallmark of these early “little men” who inhabit middling strata of the ­Petersburg bureaucracy is their inarticulateness; one major plot contour of the nineteenth-century Text traces the battle these tongue-tied heroes wage against their “father” Peter over signification. In the Petersburg ur-text (the originating and prototypical story of the city’s literary tradition), the initially content Evgenii is eventually pushed to rise up and speak out against his creator. Though his verbal rebellion ends in apparent submission and death, his one-man mutiny

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nonetheless forces the Horseman to reveal his vulnerability (and prefigures another historical uprising against the tyrannical state which would take place that same year under the watchful bronze gaze of the city’s founder). The “eternal” titular councilor Akakii travels a similar arc: while his own verbal protest culminates in his symbolic immolation, his postmortem revenge unnerves the IP, disrupting his blistering and well-ordered words (if only a little). Though both Evgenii and Akakii pay for their newly performative speech with their life (or attain it fully only after death), each can be said to triumph on the symbolic plane: these seemingly failed rebellions actually weaken a link in Peter’s carefully maintained chain of chin. But Akakii’s real triumph lies not in the symbolic demotion of his superior but in his own verbal evolution: through the animated, embodied language he awakens and pursues, the incoherent copier Akakii finds a final transcendence of the city’s stultifying bureaucratic order.10 Bringing these particular authors, texts, and subtexts into dialogue with one another reveals something new and profound about the opposition of political and linguistic authority in the Petersburg literary tradition: the potential—and even the imperative—for verbal rebellion in this city founded by the authoritarian Word of Peter; and, more broadly, about the power and dangers inherent in literary language. Essentially, by merging the written tradition (representing the Petersburg establishment in odes dedicated to the “God” Peter) with the oral (subverting that establishment in prophesies of the capital’s 10 It is worth noting that “Nevsky Prospect,” the first in Gogol’s so-called Petersburg tales and the middle story in my own analysis, represents something of a conceptual outlier in this schema. Here, the relatively straightforward oral function in Pushkin’s works of 1833 (where words variously create, defy, provoke, and fail) is upended by Gogol: the story presents an interesting variation on the theme of verbal creation and struggle, in which Petersburg’s principal street represents the still-active residue of the Petrine logos, animating and destroying at will. While the lieutenant Pirogov fits in alongside the city’s other “assimilators,” his textual counterpart Piskarev is in no position to launch any sort of verbal attack against such a monstrous icon of orality. As a visual artist, Piskarev is the sole central character under investigation who does not occupy a rung on the Petrine ladder—whether bureaucratic or military—and, as such, does not need to pick his path through the sign system. In fact, he seems perfectly content to remain a stranger to the social structure—a hero without medal or mustache—until he aspires to a benefit (marriage) above his station. His intended Madonna’s sneering response to his offer of impoverished matrimony (“I’m no laundress or seamstress that I should have to work!” [32]) reveals his insignificance, triggers his artistic sell-out (painting erotic art in exchange for opium), and accelerates his easy destruction by the demonic forces of the city.

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destruction), the first authors of the Petersburg Text succeeded in making the city’s printed literature a site of subversion. This focus on the verbal serves not only to bare two different approaches to Peter’s ladder (ascend or jump off), but also to trace an important arc of development among the city’s rebels (who seem the closest analogues to their authors in their embodiment of the subversive word). Akakii’s posthumous defrocking of the IP is more than just a comic reflection of Evgenii’s challenge to the Bronze Horseman: the stutterer’s coherent (and effective) command marks the linguistic progression of the little man toward true verbal performativity. Evidence of the verbal conflict and its centrality to the Petersburg Text can be seen not only in the characters’ struggle for status but in the charged contest between other opposing forces, particularly the animate vs. the inanimate, the oral vs. the written, and the visual vs. the verbal. As I have argued, the socio-­ political awakening of these characters is reflected in their material surroundings: as befits a city founded by the word, characters’ verbal performances (their outbursts, their gain or loss of language, their obsessive repetitions) are ­invariably accompanied by material animation or, conversely, human deanimation. Evgenii curses, and the Bronze Horseman clatters to life; Germann mutters “three, seven, Ace,” and cards bloom into spiders and gentlemen before his eyes; and in Gogol’s Petersburg, body parts parade down a street that has been reconfigured as a giant mouth; the silver-tongued Kovalev loses his power of speech when his nose absconds and masquerades as a state councilor; and the copy clerk Akakii Akakievich, who can’t put two words together, winks and flirts with letters that he copies out in even rows. The authors of the early ­Petersburg Text, by animating the verbal (both literally, by calling down statues, and figuratively, by inscribing the protests of the subjugated) commit acts of Logos that rival the creation of Petersburg itself: they pronounce a destabilizing word against Peter’s established order, then actively turn that word to flesh. These astonishing acts of animation are, in the end, simply the most spectacular examples of the larger story these texts are chronicling: the effort (and, often, the failure) to create, define, and control one’s own circumstances and surroundings. The hazy line between animate and inanimate is also represented onomastically. On entering the impersonal, dehumanizing order, the citizens of Peter’s city lose their identity and are reduced to rank alone. The literary tradition is littered with characters whose names are variously lost, deformed,

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altered, or mistaken: Evgenii, Ivan Iakovlevich, Major Kovalev, Petrovich, and the Important Personage are all somehow “un-named” (while, by contrast, the Nose actually acquires a name over the course of his story, as though to underscore the city’s unnatural inversion of the animate/inanimate hierarchy). As we have seen, the authors of the early Petersburg Text infused the city’s written tradition (associated with the establishment, controlled from above) with elements from the oral tradition (associated with subversion, whispered from below) to draw out the disruptive, destabilizing aspects of literary fiction. This play between the oral and written word is discernable in a number of the texts considered in this study; perhaps not surprisingly, given the strong correlation between the spoken word and antiauthoritarianism, the theme of orality is developed most clearly in the tales of the rebels (rather than the assimilators). In The Bronze Horseman—which opens with a paean to Peter and his creation that consciously echoes figures and tropes from the written tradition—the oral word is linked to rebellion from below: the only words spoken aloud in the poem express Tsar Alexander’s powerlessness in the face of a catastrophic event and Evgenii’s open challenge to the Bronze Horseman, indisputable emblem of the establishment.11 Gogol takes Pushkin’s marriage of ode and povest’ a step further: his skaz style reflects his attempt to imbue printed text with characteristics of oral narration: idiosyncratic, discursive, and disruptive. By contrast, the “official” society his bureaucrats inhabit—characterized as rigidly hierarchical and slavishly imitative—is associated with the “dead” documents of officialdom: inert, nongenerative, and wholly unoriginal. Gogol’s heroes struggle between these poles of “living” (creative) and “dead” (copied) language; in the upside-down logic of this bureaucratic inferno, however—where “significance” is gained through the successful imitation of one’s superiors—textual reproduction assures survival, while voicing dissent to the system invites a “verbal roasting” (or worse). In “The Overcoat,” letters leave their bureaucratic texts, drawing Akakii from the deadening world of documents and toward his own coherent 11 Peter’s own originating Word, of course, is equally revolutionary (though it is a revolution dictated and delimited from above); by Evgenii’s time, however, the Petrine fiat has solidified into a stony semiotic of name, status, and style. Perhaps this is why, in the poem, the tsar doesn’t speak his monumental Word aloud—rather, his thoughts are interpreted and inscribed by the ironic panegyrist of the prologue.

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and creative word; the verbal performances of Petrovich and the IP are countered (with varying degrees of success) by the stutterer’s burgeoning voice, culminating in his glorious posthumous coup de mot. His unexpected midlife march toward oral agency plays out against Gogol’s exaggerated bureaucratic background, accentuating the astonishing unlikelihood of such a triumph of living language in the fact of such social and textual intransigence. And oral themes are not entirely confined to these two tales of verbal rebellion: although “Nevsky Prospect” does not follow the rise and fall of an unruly clerk, it fleshes out the theme of the city’s (rather than its dwellers’) orality. The demonic narrator and the iconic hellmouth bring together two aspects of orality: the creative (expression) and the destructive (ingestion). The result is an ­all-­consuming oral force, capable of generating grotesque new realities, then abruptly devouring them at dusk: Peter’s city as self-generating and self-­ canceling verbal force. Meanwhile, on the human scale, printed text—trivial beside this monstrous orality—is “baked” and consumed by the more petty demons of Peter’s hierarchy. This rivalry between the oral and the textual—two verbal forces vying for dominance in a city founded by one and perpetuated/monumentalized by the other—is related to the broader contest between the verbal and the visual. As we have seen, this opposition has roots in pre-Petrine Russia, where the icon had been considered the material equivalent of the word of scripture; Peter rent visual from verbal, however, denigrating the image (which he associated with traditional orthodoxy), and venerating the logos (associated with the rationalism of the secular West). In the Petersburg texts of the 1830s and 1840s—by which time the verbal had fully surpassed the visual in Russian culture— Pushkin and Gogol found various ways to restore the balance or bridge the gap between these newfound representational adversaries. While Pushkin is not as obviously “visual” in his poetics as Gogol, he nonetheless manages to poetically neutralize Peter’s logos. The Bronze Horseman, for instance, opens and closes in a pre-Petrine landscape, returning reader and land alike to a time before Peter pronounced his transformative Word. Meanwhile, the reformer himself is transformed, post-utterance, into a mute monument—and with an iconic precursor, no less.12 Likewise, in “The Queen of Spades,” the playing 12 David Bethea points out the intentional resemblance between Falconet’s monument to Peter and the icon of St. George the Wonderworker, a connection that was certainly

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cards—representing the social and political possibilities open to the nineteenth-century Petersburg subject, beyond the near-stasis of gradational hierarchy and blood—reintegrate the visual (three hearts) and the verbal (troika), suggesting that only such a synthesis might exert an enlivening influence on what had become an inflexible, static system. Gogol, who had actually trained as a visual artist, was more explicitly visual in his orientation—his texts are a showcase not only for his hyperverbality but for his hypervisuality; Where Pushkin sought to reintegrate the aesthetics of image and word (or return to an earlier cultural space, prior to their sundering), Gogol’s is a more antagonistic approach, rejecting Peter’s logos and emphasizing the hostility between icon and narrative. “Nevsky Prospect,” in which a painter is ensnared and consumed by the overwhelming orality of the city, illustrates the irreconcilability of the visual and verbal in contemporary Petersburg. This cultural situation doesn’t reflect a simple hierarchy of verbal over visual, however: the astonishing creatures of the narrator’s logos are equally threatened by the devouring hellmouth, an inverted icon at the center of the city that damns rather than redeems. These two forces are essentially locked in an eternal battle of creation and destruction, auguring nothing but negation. In “The Nose,” the (parodic) Word is embodied in a renegade hunk of flesh, detached from the formerly unified face of his bearer and promoted to a higher rank: it’s the drama of the Petrine logos, writ ridiculous. Major Kovalev, left verbally impotent in the absence of his nose/word, stands powerless before his own member, which has become a spectacle of significance: a body enveloped in the gold braid, standing collar, and plumed hat of a state councilor. In Gogol’s typically convoluted style, the verbal has escaped its “place,” only to be taken over by the visual, which in turn poses a threat to the verbal: the promotion of one above the other has led to an ongoing—and doomed—contest of representation. By the end, fleshly and aesthetic synthesis has been reestablished (though the city and its citizens are no less petty in their concerns). Finally, in perceived by Pushkin and other later interpreters of the statue (The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989], 47–50). While three-dimensional statuary had been prohibited in Orthodox Rus’, so “the sculpture of Peter on the horse thus stands on the other side of the deep divide separating pre-Petrine Russia from the world in which Pushkin grew up,” it seems that the poet enjoyed the ironic juxtaposition of the world-speaking tsar and his clanking, silencing replacement (Clayton, Dimitry’s Shade, 166).

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“The Overcoat,” Akakii’s rows of duplicated letters—which he admires for their elegant strokes rather than their representational purpose—leave their lines of text to settle on the face of their copier. Their official role (literal reduplication), their reduction to aesthetic form, and their flight from linguistic context all underscore the degradation of their abstract (verbal) capacity compared with their material (visual) significance. These letter icons, in turn, lead Akakii—a different sort of “living letter” Kako—from his own verbal prison, transforming him from passive copier to disruptive creator: in a sense, the visual and the oral have teamed up against the dead, written word of Peter’s bureaucratic order, and in the end, they triumph. Ultimately, “The Overcoat,” chronicling the disruptive influence—and eventual transcendence—of an inarticulate Petersburg hero who dares to step “out of order,” becomes something of a mastertext of the early Petersburg Text, inheriting, elaborating, and drawing to a point the tradition’s central themes of language, authority, and rebellion. Published in 1842, “Overcoat” is the first unquestionably intertextual chapter of what would become the Petersburg Text, and the first of Gogol’s tales to engage explicitly with the issues of despotism and rebellion raised by The Bronze Horseman (which was fully published, with a few modifications, only after Pushkin’s death in 1837). Lednicki has noted Gogol’s dependence on Pushkin’s model, and the two texts certainly share a central plotline in the verbal rise of a disenfranchised clerk; but Gogol was responding to more than just Pushkin’s poema: his final Petersburg tale also calls attention to the broader ideas developed in the earlier Petersburg works, including the tensions between animate/inanimate, oral/written language, the verbal/visual divide, etc.13 According to the orthographic subtext of “Overcoat,” a scribe brings his letters to life by removing them from the deadening context of bureaucratic replication and circulation. Liberated from their stultifying bureaucratic forms, they take on the life promised in their names: Zhivete, Myslete, and so on. They, in turn, bring their creator to life, showing him the creative, performative possibilities of language outside Peter’s order. In a sense, Akakii’s tale reiterates and literalizes the entire 13 The earlier stories in the tradition, written between 1833 and 1836, had not been composed as part of a unified cycle or tradition; while it is likely that they were written in dialogue with one another, at least in part, the stories probably owed at least some of their similarities to their authors’ artistic responses to shared cultural concerns and questions.

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linguistic drama of Petersburg: the hero (like the authors of the Petersburg Text) takes hold of the creative word, freeing language from its official Petersburg function (extolling and upholding Peter’s order). The clerk’s newfound ability to signify—to create and define his own meaning—leads him to attain, for the first time in the tradition, his own word to rival that of the authorities. In terms of this study’s broader themes, his rebellion is brought about through the reunion of the visual and the oral, which prevail over Peter’s paper world. His achievement of signification also, arguably, gives him a measure of control over the city’s peculiar animation: unlike his predecessors, Akakii is not ­threatened by animated bits of the material world (statues, cards, noses)— instead, he comes back himself to demand what is his.

Beyond Pushkin and Gogol Dolinin has suggested that Toporov shaped his critical construct of the Petersburg Text around Crime and Punishment and other works by Dostoevsky, then projected it back over the earlier part of the tradition (for which his salvational model was not such a perfect fit). My own rereading of those earliest texts in the tradition has revealed the explicitly linguistic foundations of the Petersburg Text, as well as a particular set of thematic motifs and oppositions (animate/inanimate, oral/textual, verbal/visual), which would, in turn, inform and shape the poetics of Dostoevsky and other subsequent authors of the Text. This concluding section of my study presents a brief analysis of Crime and Punishment within the rich context of the established Petersburg Text, reading it against the “chapters” that preceded it, and finding new meanings in the hero’s interaction with his own literary tradition.14 In contrast to the originating Petersburg texts—which, after all, weren’t conceived as part of a tradition—Dostoevsky and his hero are highly 14 As a legal scholar at the university, Raskolnikov would certainly have had access to the major literary texts of the burgeoning Petersburg tradition. Based on publication dates, we can assume the character’s working familiarity with all the major Petersburg works of Pushkin and Gogol, including The Bronze Horseman, the most controversial (and censored) of the original Petersburg texts. By 1865, when the events of the novel take place, a university student would have had access to both Zhukovskii’s highly edited version of the poem, published in 1837 in The Contemporary and in the 1841 collected works, as well as the more complete 1857 version published by Annenkov, in which all but the climactic uzho tebe have been restored.

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conscious of their status within an existing Petersburg Text, and can only be fully understood within this framework. It has become a critical commonplace to view Dostoevsky’s Petersburg works, and Crime and Punishment in particular, as the pinnacle of the Petersburg Text of Russian literature: the novel occupies a central position in Toporov’s theory; Fanger regards it as “unquestionably [Dostoevsky’s] greatest Petersburg work”; and Philip Rahv includes it among the three works that constitute the city’s literary backbone: “Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is doubtless the outstanding poem of that genre, as Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ is the outstanding story and Crime and Punishment the outstanding novel.”15 The hero of this crowning work of the Petersburg Text, however, stands in stark contrast to the heroes who preceded him: no displaced clerk, Raskolnikov has never occupied a rung on Peter’s dehumanizing Table of Ranks; and unlike the submissive Evgenii and Akakii before him, Raskolnikov dares to overstep. He descends, rather, from the Germann-Kovalev line of ­Petersburg heroes, pretenders to the city who grasp at just-out-of-reach codes, ranks, and words in pursuit of status within the Petersburg semiotic— or, in his case, “freedom and power.” The characters’ most important distinction, however, is a verbal one: each of the originating heroes of the Petersburg Text is alienated in some significant way from the meaning-making systems of Peter’s capital, and specifically from language. Over the course of each story, the most rebellious of the heroes employ a “rival word” to vie with Peter’s (Evgenii in his fist-shaking threat, Akakii in his blasphemous deathbed curses); they will find their own freedom and power only beyond the earthly word, however—in laughter, curses, madness, or death. In opposition to these earlier heroes, Raskolnikov stands out as the first truly articulate hero of the Petersburg Text (that is, a creatively 15 Toporov initiated his study of the cluster of works he would come to call the Petersburg Text with an influential 1973 article on the archaic patterns that structure Crime and Punishment: V. N. Toporov, “Poetika Dostoevskogo i arkhaichnye skhemy mifologicheskogo myshleniia (‘Prestuplenie i nakazanie’),” originally published in Problemy poetiki i istorii literatury (Saransk: Mordovskii gosudarstvenii universitet, 1973), 91–110; Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 184; Philip Rahv, “Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment,” in Crime and Punishment: The Coulson Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism, ed. George Gibian (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 559.

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reading, writing, and speaking subject). Dostoevsky goes to great lengths to represent his character’s verbal abilities, both oral and written: Raskolnikov is virtually defined by his command over the word (or his aspirations to command it, anyway), as illustrated by his obsession with the “new word.” In short, despite his defiant, intentional position outside the city’s economic and political power grid, he is the first major Petersburg hero to exist as a fully functioning participant in the logos-centric grid of Peter’s capital. If the earlier heroes tried in vain to gain access to Peter’s logos, only to attain (in certain cases) a sort of competing power outside it, what will happen to this new Petersburg hero, who not only aspires to but in some respect actually achieves the powerful Word of Peter? It has become obligatory in Crime and Punishment scholarship to define Raskolnikov’s “schism” (raskol), which most readers attribute to the conflict between intellect and soul or selfishness and suffering. Many read part 1 of the novel as a chart of the hero’s divided psyche; indeed, the schizoid path he cuts through Petersburg reads like a roadmap of the battle between rationality and compassion. A reading informed by the novel’s position in the Petersburg literary tradition does not invalidate this interpretation but rather helps to contextualize it: I would suggest that the schism’s roots are actually textual ones, extending back to the iconic roles established in the very earliest of Petersburg tales—the archetypal division between Peter (power and will over nature) and Evgenii (individual spirit, crushed by the forces of history). The zigzag course that Raskolnikov sets as he alternately steps toward and recoils from the idea of murder may be profitably interpreted in light of this primal Petersburg split.16 16 The influence of “The Queen of Spades” on Dostoevsky’s first Petersburg novel seems relatively straightforward, and plenty of scholars have commented on the parallels between the calculating heroes of the two works, as well as Raskolnikov’s paranoid projections of the murdered Countess onto both his own victim (Alena Ivanovna) and his pursuer (Porfirii Petrovich). See A. L. Bem, “U istokov tvorchestva Dostoevskogo: Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi i Dostoevskii,” in O Dostoevskom: sbornik statei, 3 (Prague: Petropolis, 1936); and G. M. Fridlender, “Primechaniia” (PSS, 7:343) for representative comparisons of the thematic structure of “Queen” and Crime. Compared with this critical consensus on “Queen,” scholars are far more divided on the role of The Bronze Horseman. Where Fridlender associates Raskolnikov’s “rebellion” with that of Evgenii, I. L. Al’mi laments that, while the presence of The Bronze Horseman enjoys the status of axiom in Dostoevsky’s Petersburg works, most critics fail to provide any “concrete evidence” for the assumed parallel between the two heroes, besides the shared lash of a coachman’s whip. See Fridlender, “Primechaniia,” 343; and I. L. Al’mi, “‘Ekho’ ‘Mednogo vsadnika’ v tvorchestve F. M. Dostoevskogo 40–60-kh gg. (ot ‘Slabogo serdtse’ k ‘Prestupleniiu i nakazaniiu’),” in O poezii i proze (St. Petersburg: Skifiia

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One of the primary distinctions between Pushkin’s antagonists, of course, is linguistic, with Peter’s grand plans (“From here we will threaten the Swede, / Here a city will be founded”) contrasting directly with Evgenii’s small, barely articulated dreams (“Somehow I will build for myself / A humble and simple refuge”);17 where the tsar’s words instantly take shape in cast-iron and granite, the poor hero’s remain forever unrealized. In Pushkin’s poem, Peter’s performative word mimics (and seeks to supplant) the divine Logos of Genesis, revealing the tsar as an impostor-god, a true kumir. Peter’s pronouncement, like that of the Old Testament God, is tantamount to enactment: Zdes’ budet gorod instantly materializes as a iunyi grad (young city).18 The creative word laid the foundation of Peter’s city, and this coincidence of word and act is preserved in the very soil of the city, which succumbed to his will. Against this background, the schism between Raskolnikov’s words and actions is cast into high relief. The bifurcation of word and step is established almost immediately, in Raskolnikov’s opening internal monologue: “A new step [novyi shag], their own new word [novoe slovo], that’s what [people] are most afraid of . . . I babble too much, however. That’s why I don’t do anything, because I babble. However, maybe it’s like this: I babble because I don’t do anything.”19 izdatel’stvo: Semantika-S, 2002), 501. Viktor Shklovsky firmly dissociates Raskolnikov from Evgenii, maintaining that sometimes a lash is just a lash, while Valery Briusov just as fervently asserts the “fundamental influence” of Pushkin’s poem, with Raskolnikov representing Peter and Alena Ivanovna representing the victimized Evgenii (Shklovskii, Za i protiv: Zametki o Dostoevskom [Moscow, Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957], 216; V. Ia. Briusov, “Pushkin-Master,” in Pushkin: Sbornik, ed. N. K. Piksanov [Moscow: Gosizdat, 1924], 1:114). In Briusov’s formulation, the central question of the novel stems from that of The Bronze Horseman: does one man have the right to sacrifice another in pursuit of his own “higher” aims? Valentina Vetlovskaia accepts but elaborates his formula, arguing that Raskolnikov is “not only and, perhaps, not so much a hangman as a sacrificial victim,” proposing a comparison of Raskolnikov with Evgenii (“Dostoevsky and Pushkin: Petersburg Motifs in Crime and Punishment,” in Dostoevsky on the Threshold of Other Worlds, ed. Sarah Young and Lesley Milne [Ilkestone: Bramcote Press, 2006], 22). 17 Pushkin, PSS, 5:135, 139. 18 Pushkin, PSS, 5:135. 19 “Novogo shaga, novogo sobstvennogo slova oni vsego bol’she boiatsia . . . A vprochem, ia slishkom mnogo boltaiu. Ottogo i nichego ne delaiu, chto boltaiu. Pozhalui, vprochem, i tak: ottogo boltaiu, chto nichego ne delaiu” (Dostoevskii, PSS, 6:6). The final version of Crime and Punishment appears in volume 6, and the draft versions of the novel appear in volume 7; henceforth, references to volume 6 of the PSS are given in the text by page number only. Unless otherwise noted, translations are adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 1992).

Conclusion

Where for the true creators (God, Peter) the word and the step are one (Word becomes flesh or, in Peter’s case, stone), in this passage Raskolnikov locates his failure precisely in the rent between his own words and steps: rather than act in tandem to create, the first simply prohibits or fills in for the second. This opening passage unambiguously introduces the central Petersburg theme of creative language and exposes a linguistic gap between the city’s founder and his powerless inheritors. Raskolnikov’s evident frustration at his inability to act (and the obstructive function of his word) demonstrates his implicit ambition: the coincidence of word and act. Read in light of the Petersburg origin myth as represented in The Bronze Horseman, then, part 1 of the novel becomes a long journey toward the coordination of step and word, toward bringing action (murder) into step with the word (theory). Taking the “new step,” enacting the “new word,” is the ultimate object of Raskolnikov’s “Peter-drive”: through this Petrine word, the hero seeks to “author” his own fate, as well as that of others. His aspiration to authoritative status (his desire to dictate his position in the city, as well as that of the old moneylender) is tightly bound to his obsession with the “new word”: first inscribed in ink in his article “On Crime,” and later in the pawnbroker’s blood, this “word” represents an attempt to inherit the creative power of Petersburg’s originating author. His determination to voice and perform this novoe slovo suggests an active engagement with the Petersburg Text, a pursuit of Peter’s performative relationship to language; his inability to actually pronounce it, however—he manages to utter his confession, a testimony of the actualization of his word, only in the novel’s final pages—demonstrates his continued ambivalence.20 Raskolnikov’s hesitation—both to embody his printed word (to 20 This unmistakable interaction with the originating Petersburg Text is revealed to be, at least in part, unconscious or disavowed—Raskolnikov himself characterizes his ambitions of authorship as “Napoleonism,” effacing any clear Petrine connection. There is certainly no doubt that Dostoevsky had Napoleon in mind as he composed Crime and Punishment: one calligraphic exercise in his early notebooks for the novel reads, “Napoleon, J. Caesar, Rachel.” Napoleon III’s Histoire de Jules César was published in early 1865; by April of that year it had been translated into Russian, and it was greeted by widespread discussion in the Russian press. Essentially a discourse on the roles and rights of “extraordinary natures,” the book argues that the exceptional few are not bound to the same morality that binds and controls the masses. Critics correctly discerned in the book’s defense of Caesarism a self-justifying defense of Napoleonism. Significantly, one of Raskolnikov’s most famous references to Napoleon turns out to be a veiled allusion to Peter I: “No, such men are made differently; the

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bring theory into action) and to voice that embodied “word” aloud (to proclaim the crime which, after all, represented the instantiation of his theory)—also points to the familiar Petersburg division between written and oral language. His struggle to align his “word” with the theories outlined in his article demonstrates the city’s condition of profound verbal alienation—as well as the dangers to be found in the primacy of written language (associated with the popular philosophies of the West) over the oral word (associated on the Christian plane with God, and in the Petersburg context with rebellion). Scholars have long contended that Raskolnikov’s crime “corresponds intrinsically to the character of this city,” though few have articulated precisely how.21 While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that Raskolnikov’s brutal act of destruction is anchored in Peter’s great act of creation, both deeds certainly share an ideological source: utilitarianism (the “simple arithmetic” that offers “One death, and a hundred lives in exchange”) and the imposition of human will onto nature (or “playing God,” as the horrified Sonia later insists). Petersburg was likewise founded with icy rationality by Peter, who severed the country’s traditional roots, erected a new capital on the bones of its builders, and imposed his will—in the form of Western culture and a rigid bureaucracy—over nature. At its heart, the calculated murder of the “parasitic” pawnbroker reproduces in miniature Peter’s own defining act of creation; the two “crimes” are even linked verbally: while one hacked a window through to Europe (v Evropu prorubit’ okno), the other hacks open a woman’s head (Udar [. . .] srazu prorubil vsiu verkhniuiu chast’ lba).22 His irrevocable progress toward this Petrine goal in part 1 of the novel is constantly interrupted by contrasting “Evgenii moments” (leaving money with the wretched Marmeladovs; defending the vulnerable girl) which reveal the hero’s sympathy for (or identification with) the city’s downtrodden victims. The hero’s psychological oscillation true master, to whom everything is permitted, sacks Toulon, makes a slaughterhouse of Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, expends half a million men in a Moscow campaign, and gets off with a pun in Vilno; and when he dies, they set up monuments [kumiry] to him—and thus everything is permitted. No, clearly such men are made not of flesh but of bronze!” (211, my emphasis). The slippage in the text from Napoleonism to Petrism almost seems to constitute a case of authorial misdirection; not only does Raskolnikov delude himself into focusing on the French general, but his fixation on Napoleon has led generations of readers and critics away from his truest source: ultimately, it’s not really about the French emperor at all, but about the Russian one—the true “man of bronze.” 21 Rahv, “Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment,” 560. 22 Walker, “Transformation Metaphors,” 44.

Conclusion

between these two roles—Peter, controller of word and nature, and Evgenii, disordered victim of the State—is hardly put to rest with the terrible enactment of his novoe slovo at the end of the first book; for as long as he remains a creature of Petersburg, these two pre-plotted paths will continue to direct his steps: eulogies to men made “not of flesh but of bronze” (211) will alternate with trips to the impoverished Marmeladov family, whose example of Christian sacrifice and suffering will mark his path toward salvation. The “new word” that so preoccupies Raskolnikov throughout the novel is articulated most succinctly in his article “On Crime”: men are divided into two classes, the ordinary (who maintain the human race) and the extraordinary (who are able—even obliged—to advance it with a new word); the extraordinary man has the right to set the direction of history, to call a new direction into being, without regard for the human costs or moral consequences. This “new word,” in other words, turns out to be no more than a copy of Peter’s, and this is the irony of Raskolnikov’s journey toward performativity: by duplicating Peter’s word, rather than speaking his own, the law student is reduced to the level of a copy clerk. Raskolnikov’s turn from the idolatrous new word of Peter back toward the Word of God, the true originating Logos, structures the metaphysical level of narrative. Raskolnikov’s transcendence over the “new,” earthly word of Peter will truly begin when he opens up the Johannine gospel and becomes acquainted with the true Word.23 During Raskolnikov’s Siberian incarceration, the reader understands, he will be restored to new life by the gospels; the novel ends with an image of the prisoner pulling Sonia’s copy of the New Testament from under his pillow and contemplating it. The narrator projects his eventual spiritual rebirth but declines to articulate this “new story” in words: But now begins a new story, the story of a man’s gradual renewal [obnovlenie], the story of his gradual rebirth, his gradual transition from one world into another, his acquaintance with a new hitherto 23 During his own Siberian imprisonment, Dostoevsky had read a book of the gospels; his numerous markings indicated a noticeable preference for the Johannine gospel, which is distinguished from the others by its clear Christological focus—it is this gospel that begins with the famous hymn to the Word identifying Christ as the eternal Logos of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [. . .] And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” See Irina Kirillova, “Dostoevsky’s Markings in the Gospel according to St. John,” in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, ed. George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 42; John 1:1, 14.

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completely unknown reality. It might make the subject of a new story—but our present story has ended. (422) The obsessive focus on the “new” at novel’s end (Raskolnikov’s “new future,” “new life,” “new story,” and “new tale” are all forecast) underscores the irony in Raskolnikov’s earlier fixation on speaking a new word. This so-called novoe slovo was nothing but an imitation of Peter’s—a “foreign translation,” as ­R azumikhin termed it. By supplanting that derivative, deadening new word that opened the novel with the revitalizing “new tale” that is about to begin— alongside Sonia and her New Testament—Dostoevsky heralds Raskolnikov’s future as bearer of the true Word. It is through Sonia that Raskolnikov is reunited with the Word of God; but while her reading of the Lazarus story prepares him for his own eventual resurrection, her spiritual guidance back to Orthodoxy does not consist of gospel alone. As Janet Tucker details, Sonia “becomes an icon that draws Raskol’nikov in”: her face and body are described in terms of an icon (thin and angular, with transparent skin and luminous eyes), and she assumes “iconic” positions at pivotal points in the text.24 She is illuminated by candle during her reading of Scripture, just as an icon is illuminated by a lamp, and various characters bow before her or kiss her feet, as worshipers might bow before (klaniat’sia, poklonit’sia) or kiss an icon: when Sonia became a prostitute to save the family, Katerina Ivanovna stayed all evening “kneeling at her feet, kissing her feet”; Dunia surprised her with “an attentive, polite, and full bow” on meeting her; just before her reading of Lazarus, Raskolnikov suddenly “bent all the way down, leaned towards the floor, and kissed her foot”; and finally, the Siberian 24 Tucker notes Sonia’s physical resemblance to an icon and notes her “iconic pose” (holding Raskolnikov’s hand, like the Mother of God and Christ Child) on the banks of the Siberian river. See Janet G. Tucker, Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 120, 128. In addition, as Amanda Murphy has shown, she strikes an umilenie (tenderness) pose with her hands when Raskolnikov tells her about his crime, physically replicating Lizaveta’s pose just before the murder (holding a bundle, backed into the icon corner, illuminated by the setting sun) and evoking the famous pose of the Vladimir Mother of God icon (from the unpublished paper “Compassion as Grace Incarnate; Sonia Marmeladova’s Iconic Role in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,” given at the AAASS National Conference, Washington, DC, 2006).

Conclusion

prisoners go to her for healing and “bow to her,” calling her their “little mother [Matushka].”25 Her function in the novel is consistent with this strong iconic association: she becomes an instrument (a sort of living icon), offering divinity and redemption to Raskolnikov. In this book that is largely a battle of words— imitative novoe slovo of Peter vs. the truly creative Logos of God—the iconic image of Sonia restores the lost status of the image in Peter’s secular empire; she is the embodiment of both Word (her voice rings out “like a bell” as she reads the gospel story) and icon, and it is undoubtedly significant that Raskolnikov is led back to the sacred Logos by this fusion of word and image. In the body of Sonia, Dostoevsky has finally reunited the Word and Icon sundered by Peter, healing the original raskol of modern Russian culture and allowing Raskolnikov (embodiment of this schism) full access to the divine. This reunion of word and image enables Raskolnikov to transcend the destructive word of Peter—the sterile and destructive rationalism of the Western logos—and rise toward redemption.

Beyond the Nineteenth Century Although Raskolnikov’s journey unfolds on a spiritual (rather than political or bureaucratic) plane, it nonetheless leads him to engage with the same questions of language and authority as his literary predecessors, beginning with Evgenii. Initially obsessed with Peter’s new word, Raskolnikov slowly relinquishes it and follows his spiritual predecessors beyond the deadening forces of Peter’s city. Instead of completing his own journey in death or madness, however, he ends up in Siberia—the emblem of true, holy Rus’, the anti-Petersburg. Read as a whole, these plotlines chart a steady, if uneven, arc of development, as subsequent heroes move further—and more successfully—away from Peter’s unholy Word. And the arc doesn’t end with Raskolnikov’s “new beginning”: the process that started with Evgenii’s fist-shaking curse would continue through generations 25 Katerina “ves’ vecher v nogakh u nei na kolenkakh prostoiala, nogi ei tselovala”; Dunia “otklanialas’ ei vnimatel’nym, vezhlivym i polnym poklonom”; “Vdrug [Raskol’nikov] ves’ bistro naklonilsia i, pripav k polu, potseloval ee nogu”; the prisoners “vse snimali shapki, vse klanialis’: ‘Matushka, Sof ’ia Semenovna, mat’ ty nasha, nezhnaia, boleznaia!’”

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of literary rebels, as deadened subjects awakened and aimed their own words back at their demonic creator. As the tradition progressed, a series of verbal challenges was leveled at the Creator, his Cosmos, and finally his very Word. In Pushkin’s poema, the Horseman is summoned and confronted; in “The Overcoat,” he is disfigured in an anecdotal aside; and finally, in Crime and Punishment, he is overlooked by the hero, and ultimately expunged by the author from the final draft. By century’s end, Peter’s order is still intact but badly destabilized, his controlling logos still potent but vulnerable. The battering would continue into the next century, as new waves of writers—and their rebel-heroes— continued the textual assault on Peter’s cruel city. By the time Petersburg had lost both its name and its status,26 Evgenii’s challenge had been taken up by а whole new generation of modernist writers, who brought a fresh set of aesthetic tools to the ongoing confrontation between political and literary authority in Petersburg. The narrative focus on the word-made-flesh, so conspicuous in the works examined above, is by no means confined to the nineteenth-century texts of the tradition. In Bely’s Petersburg (1913–14; revised 1922), for instance, the father Apollon Apollonovich inherits this strange Petrine gift of Logos: his mind, we are informed, becomes “a womb of thought-images” which take on flesh in the shadowy streets of the revolutionary capital.27 The novel stages a modernist iteration of the city’s cycle of creation and destruction: through the Senator’s gift of mozgovaia igra (brain play), a single “runaway thought” engenders the stranger Dudkin, who will, in turn, annihilate the Senator.28 The city’s verbal circle of life—the father speaks into life a “son,” who seeks to bring down his progenitor—is thus reiterated in the first major twentieth-century chapter of the Petersburg Text. In Bely’s Petersburg, however, it is not only the word and the letters that take on life but sounds themselves—that is, not only language but its smallest constituent parts. 26 The city was renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924; in 1918, the capital was moved back to Moscow. 27 “Stanovilas’ chrevom myslennykh obrazov” (Andrei Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov [Kiev: Dnipro, 1990], 38). All translations of Petersburg are from Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 28 “Bezhavshaia mysl’” (ibid., 38).

Conclusion

Bely’s modernist masterpiece represents a natural progression in the logos-centric life cycle of the Petersburg tradition, which began in 1833 when Pushkin’s Peter, his head crowded with unuttered thoughts, drew a glittering Cosmos out of a boggy Chaos. His subjugated creature Evgenii eventually uttered his own word which, though incoherent, had potency enough to animate bronze and drag the creator down from his pedestal to right his teetering order. Gogol inherited this challenging, creative Word of The Bronze Horseman, eventually elaborating it, in “The Overcoat,” into an entire city of performative letters. Bely became heir to this nineteenth-century legacy of living language, and constructed a revolutionary city of “performative sound”: “‘Ooo-ooo-ooo.’ A humming filled the space of the hall and through the ‘ooo’ sometimes was heard: ‘Revolution . . . Evolution . . . Proletariat . . . Strike.’”29 This mournful “ooo”—the “October song of the year nineteen hundred and five”—wends its way through the novel: through fields and towns, over bridges, and finally into cities, whistling down canals and filling lecture halls and engendering words (“revolooo-ooo-oootion”) that might menace or electrify, depending on the status of the listener. Whole chapters are born of this creative, living sound: the “ooo” that echoes through the streets of the capital gives birth to new words, new plots, and new Petersburg rebellions. This book, which opened with the idea of the creative, animating Word, will close with it as well. In the eighteenth century, the new literary language was devoted to deifying the reformer-tsar himself; by early in the nineteenth, however, the poets who inherited his word had begun to turn it back against its creator. Petersburg—itself the embodiment of Peter’s authoritative word— became the empire’s literary capital, a natural site of social and political engagement, where poets could explore the creative (and destructive) potential of the written word, encode critiques of the state, and lay the foundations of what would become, a century later, a sort of literary “second government.”30 Beginning with Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, where Peter calls forth an entire world with his Word, and Evgenii calls down Peter with his own, the 29 “‘Uuu-uuu-uuu.’ Gudelo v prostranstve i skvoz’ eto ‘uuu’ razdavalos’ podchas: ‘Revoliutsiia . . . Evoliutsiia . . . Proletariat . . . Zabastovka. . .’” (ibid., 119). 30 According to a character in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (V kruge pervom, 1968) writers constitute a nation’s second government (vtoroe pravitel’stvo ): its conscience, a site of moral authority, and a voice of truth.

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earliest works of the Petersburg tradition monumentalize this extraordinary power of words, which are variously copied and manipulated, mumbled and roared; over the course of the tradition’s first decade, they rebel, annihilate, escape, and finally transcend. Certainly, a city engendered in the Word should be expected to privilege verbal creation and performance; it is no surprise that a city whose very existence is said to have sprung from a single man’s declaration should be inclined to memorialize the creative power of language with generations of potent literary heroes—all the Bronze Horsemen, Important Personages, His Excellencies, and other literary “fathers,” as well as their rebellious “sons”—whose words have the power to become flesh. The bureaucratic city reflected in these texts, however, has frozen into lifeless matter; an inflexible system of empty forms and rigid routine, jealously guarded by its petrified creator. And the language of this new capital is the language of officialdom: formal, clichéd, and devoid of creative energy, it has fossilized into the repeated dogmas of bureaucracy. Against this deadened bureaucratese, the literary texts that emanate from Peter’s city celebrate the power of the living word: curses, personified letters, slippery narrative, and the divine Logos—in short, the performative Word, in all its guises—offer a playful, creative counterforce to Peter’s rigid order. In opposition to the endlessly enacted verbal formulae of Peter’s strictly controlled city text, the originating writers of the Petersburg Text have called into existence their own counternarrative: a verbally charged space galvanized by the power of performative language. It is in “The Overcoat” that we see this liberating function of language most clearly: the cunning narrative delights in its own verbal excesses, leaving readers breathless and pointing Akakii out of the dead bureaucratic text he inhabits. And it is not only words that spring to life to propel plot and characters alike, but letters themselves: Akakii’s living letters soar into the space of the capital, electrifying the very air of Peter’s city and bringing the possibility of verbal rebellion within the grasp of all subjects. The authorities respond, of course: the tradition spawned by the creative word of Petersburg is littered with the remains of hopeful heroes variously silenced, subjugated, or slaughtered by the machinery of state—to say nothing of their authors. Their words live on, however; Peter (or at least his monument) might keep watch over the stony artifacts of his verbal fiat, but the city’s countertext—the rival monument

Conclusion

constructed out of all the lines and letters, curses and kakos, “ooo”s and uzhos of the “little men” degraded by Peters’s new order—has endured and grown, as authors (and their rebellious heroes) continue grappling with the issues of authority and authorship at the heart of the city’s tradition. Their words might not literally melt bronze, but they have been calling down tyrants since 1833.

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Index

A

Admiralty building, 164, 166–167 Aizlewood, Robin, 61–62 Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery, 120, 121 Alexander I, 5, 34, 55 Algarotti, Francesco, xivn3 animation, material. see also verbal animation in Gogol’s literature, 193n60 in literature, ix–x in Petersburg literature, x–xii, xx–xxi, xxvii, xl–xli, xliii–xliv, 219–220 Annenkov, P. V., 82n9, 189n52, 233n14 Annensky, Innokentii, 125, 155 Annunciation, 128–129, 132–144, 150, 160, 163. Feast of the Annunciation, 129, 132, 157, 168, 174 in Gogol, 142 in Pushkin, 140–142 in visual art, 137–141 Antsiferov, Nikolai, xxii, xxiii, 2n4 Austin, J. L., xxxi, 28n87

B

Bardsley, Sandy, 89n28, 90 Batiushkov, Konstantin, xvii Bayley, John, 8n20 Bely, Andrei, xlvn95, xlviin98, 94n45, 114n80 Petersburg, xin4, 219, 242–243 Berman, Marshall, 2, 2n4 Bernheimer, Charles, 177 Bestuzhev, Aleksandr, 9 Bethea, David, xxiv, 1, 19n66, 22n77, 23n78, 49, 53, 53n35, 56n44 Bible book of Genesis, xvi, xviii, xxxix, xl, xliv, 26, 30-34, 92, 135, 154-155, 221, 223

book of Isaiah, 5, 88n25, 138, 142 book of Job, 2, 13–15, 16–25, 39–40 in Pushkin, 7–11 book of Judith, 6 book of Revelation, xviii–xix, 33n104, 88n25, 92n39 gospel of John, xxix–xxx, 239, 239n23 gospel of Luke, 131, 134–135 gospel of Matthew, 118 Biblical translation, 5–6, 6n13, 27n85 Blagoi, D. D., 10–11, 10n34, 10n36 Blake, William, 7, 223 The Book of Urizen, 223 Bocharov, Sergei, 155, 194 “Around ‘The Nose,’” 155 Bogoslovskii, M. M., xiiin2 Briusov, Valerii, 1, 236n16 Brodsky, Joseph, xxiv Brombert, Victor, 178 bronze Grandmaman, 68–69 Bruni, Fedor, 8 Buckler, Julie A., xv, xvin9, xviin12, xix, xxvn34, xxvi, xxvii, xxixn47, xlviin98, 84n13, 167 Bukov, A., 187, 188 burning and baking motifs, 107–109, 132, 152-153, 211–212 Buzhinsky, Gavrilo “Oration in Praise of St. Petersburg and Its Founder,” xvii

C

Call, Paul, 79n86 Carlyle, Thomas, 7 Caruth, Cathy, 222, 223 Catherine II, 47–49, 50–52, 53–56, 57, 60–64, 65–69 Chereisky, L. A., 184

274

Index Church Slavonic, xxxviii, xl, 10, 14n48, 27n85, 28n90, 178, 180, 186–187, 220 conceptio per aurem, 135–138, 140 Confino, Michael, 47n14 Connolly, Julian, 84n14, 85, 86n18, 102 Constas, Nicholas, 138–139 Cornwell, Neil, 45n9, 51, 52n31 Cracraft, James, xiiin4, xxxvin70, xxxvii Crain, Patricia, 180 Crone, Anna Lisa, xxixn47 Cyrillic letters, 178, 181, 182, 187, 201, 217n125 Az, 183, 184, 189, 198 azbuka, 189–193 Buki, 206–210 Ier, 184, 185 Izhitsa, 183, 184, 189, 198, 217 Kako, 178–180, 183, 185, 190, 191, 194, 196, 200, 203, 205, 214, 218, 232, 245 Tverdo, 200–206 Myslete, 200–206 Slovo, 200–206 Zhivete, 200–210

D

Davidson, Pamela, xxxivn61, xxxvn66, xliin91, 122n99 Davydov, Sergei, 6n15, 45n9, 46n13, 63, 80n2 Day, Jennifer, xxixn47 Decembrists, 3, 20n68, 39, 42, 46, 50–52, 77 Derrida, Jacques, xxxiin54 Derzhavin, G. R., xvii, xxx, xlii, 29, 94 Didron, Adolphe Napoléon Christian Iconography: The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages, 88 Dignan, Patricia, 89 Dilaktorskaia, O. G., 117, 133n26, 134, 157n91 Dixon, Simon, 53n34, 55n39, 56 Dolinin, Alexander, xxvi, 233 Dostoevsky, Fedor, xxiv, xxvi, xxix, xlvi, xlviin98, 59n50, 84, 176, 233–241 Crime and Punishment, 233–237, 240–242 Dronke, Peter, xxxiiin59

E

Egorov, Iurii, 166, 167 Eichenbaum, Boris, 177, 179n12, 196, 196n72 Eleutherius, 136 Emerson, Caryl, 43 Epstein, Mikhail, 8n20 Esipov, V., 51n29

Eucharist, 89, 130, 170 Evetsky, Orest, 187 Eyck, Jan van, 138

F

Falconet monument to Peter the Great, vii, 23n78, 55, 167, 176, 230n12 Filaret, Metropolitan, 11 Fishbane, Michael, 27n86 Fra Angelico, 138 Frank, Susi, 131 Freud, Sigmund, 28 Moses and Monotheism, 222 Studies in Hysteria, 222 Freudian psychoanalysis, xxxn49, 222

G

Galpern, Joyce, 89n25 Gatrall, Jefferson, xxxvi Gaudentius, St., 136 General Staff Building, 99, 119, 120, 126 Glinka, Fedor, 8 Glykas, Michael, 139 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7n20, 9 Faust, 7 Gogol, N. V., xliii, xlv–xlvi, 80–84 Arabesques, 83, 88, 96, 114 An Author’s Confession, 82, 142n53 “Christmas Eve,” xlv Dead Souls, 82, 87–88, 94–95, 193n60, 216n123 Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, 81, 85, 104n68 The Inspector General, xlv, 82, 94, 216n123 Meditations on the Divine Liturgy, 129n12, 130–131, 142n53 “Nevsky Prospect,” xlvi, xlviii, 80–124, 126, 148, 152, 164, 168, 224, 230, 231 “The Nose,” 108, 125–174, 127n7, 224, 226, 228, 231 “Notes of a Madman,” 91, 126, 142, 224 “On the Middle Ages,” 88 “The Overcoat,” xlviii, 126, 142, 175–218, 224, 226, 229, 232 “Sculpture, Painting, and Music,” 88, 114 “A Terrible Vengeance,” 94 “The Portrait,” xlv, 85, 122n100, 125, 142n54, 224 Golburt, Luba, xln88, 45n8, 54, 56n44 Goldfrank, David, 92 Golovkin, G. I., 29 Graffy, Julian, 85, 97n51, 116, 117n87, 197

Index Grammatin, N. F., 187 Grech, Nikolai, 183 Greenfield, Douglas, xxxvi Gref, K. F., 151 Gregg, Richard, 127, 146 Gukovskii, G. A., 45n8

H

Hebrew, 10, 11, 13n47, 14n48, 27n85, 186 Hellebust, Rolf, xxvii hellmouth, 86–95, 101, 103, 105, 108, 119, 119n96 the Petersburg hellmouth, 95–100, 103, 115-123, 126, 230, 231 The Herald of Europe, 183 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 7 Herzen, Aleksandr, xivn4 Hieroglyphics, 186, 207 Himka, John-Paul, 91, 118 Hippisley, Anthony, 200 Holquist, James M., 85n17, 86 Hubbs, Joanna, 56n44 Hughes, Lindsey, xiiin2 Humboldt, Alexander von, 184, 185n32

I

Iakovlev, P. L. “Manuscript of the Deceased Khabarov,” 185–186, 208n102 Iazykov, N. M., 10 icon vs. word (visual vs. verbal), xxxii–xxvi, xxxix–xl, 77–78, 112–115, 138n45, 220, 224, 230–232. see also Orthodox icons reunion of icon and word (visual and verbal), xliv–xlvi, 72–73, 77–78, 123, 124, 230–233, 241, Icons, Orthodox, xxxii, xxxvn67. see also icon vs. logos and Peter’s reforms, xxxvi–xxxvii and Sonia Marmeladov, 240–241 of the Annunciation, 140–141, 140n52 of the Last Judgment, 90, 91–93, 119 of Our Lady of Kazan, 157–158 of St. George, 230n12 Irving, Washington, 4 Iur’eva, I. Iu., 9n31, 11 Ivinsky, D. P., 12

J

Jakobson, Roman, 68 “The Statue in Puškin’s Poetic Mythology,” x, 68, 69, 71n77 John the Baptist, 132

K

Kaganov, Grigorii, xxxix, xln8 Kahn, Andrew, 1n1, 16n58, 47n14, 53n34 Kantemir, Antiokh, xl Kazan Cathedral, 120n97, 121n98, 132, 157–158 Kelly, Catriona, 52n33 Kireevsky, P. V., 10, 157n90 Knorre, Boris, 92 Könönen, Maija, xx Krekshin, P. N., 30

L

Labriola, Albert C., 137n44 Lacan, Jacques, xxxn49 language, oral vs. written, xvi–xix, xx, xxx, 84, 138, 209, 227–232, 238 Last Judgment, 86–95, 99–100 Gogol’s interest in, 87–88, 90–91 in Gogol’s work, 94–95 Orthodox icons of, 90, 91–92, 96, 119, 123 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 153 Leatherbarrow, William, 96, 115 Lednicki, Wacław, 4, 15n57, 22 Levitskii, Feodosii, xviiin14 Levitt, Marcus, xxxix Library for Reading, 151 Lincoln, W. Bruce, 167n109 Literaturnaia gazeta, 184–185 Logos in the Christian tradition, xxix–xxx in the Orthodox tradition, xxxiv–xxxvi in Western philosophy, xxxii–xxxv Lomonosov, M. V., xvi, xvii, xl, 8, 9, 29, 181, 204n91, 217n125 Trial of the Russian Letters, 181 Lopukhina, Evdokiia, xviii, 32 Lotman, Iu. M., xivn5, xixn17, xxiiin24, xxvii, xlvn95, 48, 65, 66, 68, 68n71, 70, 71n77, 73, 84, 96n50, 115, 116

M

Makaryk, Irena About the Harrowing of Hell, 86–87 Malik, Madhu, 117 Markovich, Vladimir, xxv, xxvi Martini, Simone, 137 Mary, Mother of God, 131, 134–135, 144, 157–158 icons of, 140, 141, 157, 240–241 physical integrity of, 135–136 role in Christianity, 157–158

275

276

Index Medwin, Thomas, 8n22 Mel’nikov, A. V., xiiin2 Melville, Herman Moby Dick, 7 Merezhkovsky, Dmitrii, 36, 37, 197, Meyer, Priscilla, 41n1, 171 Mickiewicz, Adam, 4, 12–13 Oleszkiewicz, 12 Mochulsky, Konstantin, 91 Moeller-Sally, Stephen, 106n71, 107, 133, 149, 150 monarchy, sacralization of, xvii, xln89, 29–30, 29n91 Morson, Gary Saul, 78, 172 The Moscow Herald, 186 The Moscow Observer, 133, 152 Moscow/Petersburg contrast, xiv, 57–58, 73, 155, 163n99 Murav’ev, Mikhail, xvii

N

Nadezhdin, Nikolai, 183, 204, 206, 215 Names, naming, and loss of names, xiv, xvii, 17, 144, 146–149, 173, 178, 179, 220, 228–229 Nemirovsky, Igor, 1 Neva, 22, 23, 32–35, 43, 79, 83, 132 Newsom, Carol, 39 Nicholas I, 44n6, 49, 55–56, 68n70, 118n93, 142n55, Nienshkants, xivn4 noseology, 133, 150–153, 159 new word, 235–237, 239–241

O

Obleukhov, Dmitrii, 186 Orthodox liturgy, xxxiin55, xxxiin56, xxxv, 29, 129–131, 134n28, 157–158 Orthodox theology, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxv, 139–140, 156 Ouspensky, Leonide, xxxiin56, xxxvn67 O’Toole, L. Michael, 178, 209

P

Pardes, Ilana, 7n19 Paul (apostle), 156 Pavlenko, N. I., xiiin2 Peace, Richard, 194 performative language, xi, xxix–xxxi, xxxin51, xlix, 176, 243–245 in the Annunciation, 134–135, 137, 172 in the Book of Job, 26–28 in The Bronze Horseman, 26–40

in Crime and Punishment, 235–240 in “The Overcoat,” 203, 206–210, 232–233 in “The Queen of Spades,” 76–77 Perovsky, A. A., 184 Petersburg myth, xiv–xxvii, xxviii, 42, 225 Petersburg Text, xix, xxi–xxix, xliii–xliv, xlvii–xlix, 41, 83n11, 84, 172–173, 209, 219, 224–233, 237, 242–244 Peter the Great as Antichrist or false divinity, xvi–xvii, xxi, 20, 24, 25, 32, 37, 236 as metaphorical father, xl, xlviii, 29–30, 41, 58–59, 63, 77, 199, 219, 223–224, 226, 242 creation of Petersburg, xi, xv–xxi, xxx, xliv–xlv, 165, 167. see also Petersburg as semiotic system deification of, xvii-xviii, 1–2, 4n6, 29–30 in Pushkin’s work, 50–51, 52–54, 76–79 orthographic reforms of, xxxviii, 180–181, 189, 190, 198–199, 204, 217n125, 220 reforms of, xiii–xiv, xxxvi–xli, 47 Table of Ranks, xxx, xlviii, 47, 50, 63, 65, 67, 73, 146, 168, 198, 214, 225, 234 Petersburg as semiotic system, xxii, xxx–vi, xli, xlvi–xlvii, 65, 146–148, 164–165, 169–170, 199–200, 205–206, 225–227 Petrov, P. N., xiiin1 Proclus of Constantinople, 138 Prokopovich, Feofan, xxxvii Proskurin, Oleg, 11n39, 11n40 Proskurina, Vera, xliin91, 55n38 Pugachev, Emelian, 54 Pumpianskii, L.V., 4, 15n58 Pushkin, Alexander, xliii–xlv, 176, 224, 229, 231 The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, 53 The Bronze Horseman, ix, xivn3, xvi, xix, xxiii, xxiv, xlii, xliv–xlv, xlvii, 1–40, 41–43, 46, 52–54, 58, 68, 73, 76–79, 82, 122, 148, 169, 173, 175–176, 224, 226, 229, 230, 232, 237, 243 The Captain’s Daughter, 53–54, 64n62 “Desert fathers and immaculate women,” 6 “Futile Gift,” 11 The Gavriiliad, 6, 11n39, 142 Golden Cockerel, 68 The History of Peter the Great, 53, 54

Index The History of Pugachev, 53 “Imitations of the Koran,” 6 “In Times of Diversion or Idle Boredom,” 11 “My Genealogy,” 52, 69n72 “Notes on Russian History of the Eighteenth Century,” 48 Poltava, 53 “The Prophet,” 6, 142 “The Queen of Spades,” xlviii, 41–79, 148, 224, 225, 226 “The Rabble,” 9 “A Recollection,” 11 “To a Grandee,” 52 Pushkin’s class anxieties, 45–51

R

Raevsky, Aleksandr, 9 Rahv, Philip, 234 Ranchin, A. M., 3n5 Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, 59, 200 Reynolds, Andrew, xlvii Robey, Judith, xlvn95, xlvi Rosen, Nathan, 62n58 Rosenshield, Gary, 2, 15n55, 19n67, 28, 34, 37, 46, 75 Russian Bible Society, 5–6 Russian card-game culture, 62, 65, 73–74 Russian literary language, xxxvii–xl, xli–xlvii, 215–217, 221–222

S

Safran, Gabriella, 5n9, 5n10, 6n13, 6n14 Schmidt, Dennis J., xxxiin53 Schmidt, Gary D., 86n21, 88n25 Schmid, Wolf, xxv, xxvi, xxvii Seifrid, Thomas, 133, 149, 150, 152 Senkovsky, Osip, 150, 151, 152 Satan’s Grand Procession, 152 senses, hierarchy of in Gogol’s Petersburg, 126–127, 158–161, 170–171 Shapiro, Gavriel, 90, 94n42, 94n44, 95n45, 196 Shaw, J. Thomas, 62n57 Sheehan, Jonathan, 7 Shevyrev, Stepan, 151 “Literature and Commerce,” 152 Shmidt, S. O., xiiin2 Shvidkovsky, D. O. Russian Architecture and the West, 166n107 Sindalovskii, N. A., xvn7 Skovoroda, Hryhory

Garden of Divine Songs, 94 Sloane, David, 125 Slonimskii, A. L., 71n78 Smirnova, E. S., 95 Smith, Alexandra, 42, 42n2 social advancement under Peter, 59–62 under Catherine, 60–62, 73–75 Spieker, Sven, 96 Stafford, Barbara Maria, xxxiin54, xxxiiin57 Steinberg, Leo, 135n32, 136 St. Ephrem the Syrian (Ephraem Syrus), 6, 136 Stern, Laurence The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 151 Sumarokov, Aleksandr, xvi, xvii

T

Table of Ranks, xxx, xlviii, 47, 50, 59, 63, 65, 67, 73, 146, 168, 181, 189, 197, 198, 205, 225, 234 Tarkhov, A.E., 3, 8, 8n24, 10–12, 24, 25, 38 The Telescope, 187, 204 Terras, Victor, 44 Todd, William Mills, 50n25 Toporov, Vladimir, xix–xx, xxi–xxix, 25n83, 33n104, 154n83, 157n92, 158n94, 224–225, 233–234, 234n15 trauma theory, 222-224 Trediakovsky, Vasilii, xvii, 29 Tretiak, Jozef, 12 Trisagion Prayer, 29 Tucker, Janet, 240 Tul’chinsky, G. L., xxiv

U

Uspensky, Boris, xxxiv, 115, 118

V

Vaginov, Konstantin Goat Song, xxiv Vaiskopf, Mikhail, 156, 181, 202 Vasilievsky Island, 165, 166 verbal animation in The Bronze Horseman, 28–37 in “Nevsky Prospect,” 104, 105-106, 122–123 in “The Nose,” 143, 162–163, 170–174 in “The Overcoat,” 203, 207–210, 217–218, 232–233

277

278

Index in Petersburg literature, xvi, xx-xxi, xxviii–xxxi, xl–xli, xliii–xliv, 219–220, 224–233, 243–245 in “Queen of Spades,” 65–76 in Pushkin’s Petersburg tales, 78–79, 84 “Let there be,” xv–xvi, xvin10, xviii, xx, xxviiin25, xxx, xli, 28, 28n90, 32-33, 73, 77, 131, 224-226 vs. deanimation (petrification), xlviii–xlix, 67–72, 77, 79, 104, 122, 219–220, 228, 244 verbal roasting, 200, 200n81, 211, 211n11, 212, 213, 229 vertep, 94, 117, 118n92, 119–121 Vinogradov, V.V., 128, 150, 153 Vladyshevskaia, Tatiana, xxxiin55 Vogler, Thomas, 7, 9, 24n80 Voznesensky Prospect, 128, 163, 164, 165, 166, 171

W

Wachtel, Andrew, 46, 60n52, 68 Warner, Elizabeth, 94 Warner, Marina, 136 Weiner, Adam, 87, xxxv, xliin92, xliin93, 87–88, 122n99 Western Christian iconography, 86 Williams, David, 89, 104, 207n98, 208, 208n102 Woodward, James, 143n58, 211n111, 212

Y

Yermakov, I. D., 132n23, 134n29

Z

Zakharov, Andrei, 166 Zhivov, V. M., 29 Zubov, Platon, 56n44 Zuckerman, Bruce, 13n47, 14