Gogol’s Crime and Punishment: An essay in the interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls 9781644697634

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Gogol’s title page for Dead Souls

Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History

Series Editor Lazar Fleishman (Stanford University, Palo Alto, California)

Gogol’s

Crime and Punishment An E ssay in the I nterpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls Urs Heftrich

Translated by

Joseph Swann

BOSTON 2022

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften I­ nternational— Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Heftrich, Urs, author. | Swann, Joseph, translator. Title: Gogol’s crime and punishment: an essay in the interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead souls” / Urs Heftrich; translated by Joseph Swann. Other titles: Gogol’s Schuld und Sühne. English Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic literatures, cultures, and history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053260 (print) | LCCN 2021053261 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697627 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697634 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697641 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Gogol’, Nikolaĭ Vasil’evich, 1809–1852. Mertvye dushi. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PG3332.M43 H4413 2022 (print) | LCC PG3332.M43 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3--dc23/eng/20211110 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053260 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053261 ISBN 9781644697627 (hardback) ISBN 9781644697634 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644697641 (epub) Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by PHi Business Solutions Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Horst Janssen, Portrait of Nikolai Gogol. (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Reproduced by permission Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dedicated to Ralph Dutli

Brief Contents

Detailed Contents ix Acknowledgmentsxiii Forewordxv Introduction: Of Beauty, Truth, and Evil

1

Part One: Chichikov’s Prehistory 21 1. Ethos and Epic 23 2. The Ground Plan of Dead Souls33 3. The Ground Plan of Dead Souls Revisited 97 Part Two: Chichikov’s Crime 4. On Truth and Lies in a Moral Sense 5. The Five Faces of Lying 6. In the Shadow Realm of Lies

101 103 121 171

Part Three: Chichikov’s Punishment 7. Judgment and Rumor 8. The Five Acts of the Drama 9. Ethos and Epic: Chichikov’s Crime and Punishment

175 177 227 232

List of Sources for Illustrations 239 Bibliography241 Index261

Detailed Contents

Brief Contents vii Acknowledgmentsxiii Forewordxv Introduction: Of Beauty, Truth, and Evil 1. Truth and Madness 2. Gogol’s Theory of Evil 3. Gogol’s Therapeutic Model against Evil

1 1 9 17

Part One:  Chichikov’s Prehistory Chapter 1.  Ethos and Epic 1. The Author Reviews His Work 2. The System of the Five Landowners Chapter 2.  The Ground Plan of Dead Souls 1. Pliushkin a) Young Man and Old b) Windows of the Soul c) Journey into the World d) Years of Apprenticeship 2. Sobakevich a) Amor and Agon b) Degrees of Lying c) Asceticism and Gluttony  d) The Trickster Tricked 3. Nozdrev a) The Plans of Mice and Men b) A Gamblers’ Duel c) Boundary Transgressions d) Of Sangfroid and Sweat 4. Korobochka a) The Birth of the Business Idea out of the Dirt b) Backwoods Inventory 

21 23 23 25 33 40 40 42 43 45 49 50 51 53 54 58 58 61 67 70 72 72 74

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c) Chichikov Undressed d) Poetic Misdemeanor 5. Manilov a) Apologia of Insignificance b) Theory of the Passions c) Parable of the Insouciant Landowner d) Kifa Mokievich and Mokii Kifovich  Chapter 3.  The Ground Plan of Dead Souls Revisited Part Two:  Chichikov’s Crime Chapter 4.  On Truth and Lies in a Moral Sense 1. Schiller’s Distinction between False and Aesthetical Appearances 2. The Homeric Liar-Hero 3. The Platonic-Christian Truth-Ethos  4. Gogol between Homer, Schiller, and Christianity  Chapter 5.  The Five Faces of Lying 1. Manilov a) Manilovka, or the Realm of Euphemism b) The First Face of the Lie—Rhetoric  c) The Janitor of Hades d) Manilov and Chichikov 2. Korobochka a) From Manilovka to Zamanilovka b) Mistress of Hades c) The Second Face of the Lie—Magic d) Korobochka and Chichikov 3. Nozdrev a) From Zamanilovka to Nozdrev b) The Spirit that Denies c) The Third Face of the Lie—Nihilism d) Nozdrev and Chichikov 4. Sobakevich a) Sobakevich and Chichikov b) The Fourth Face of the Lie—Cynicism c) From Nozdrev to Sobakevich d) The Deathless Koshchei

78 79 83 85 87 90 92 97 101 103 104 108 111 116 121 121 121 122 123 124 127 129 131 134 136 138 138 140 146 148 150 150 153 155 160

Detailed Contents

5. Pliushkin a) From Sobakevich to Pliushkin b) The Forgotten Face of Truth—the Divine Logos c) The Christian Sinner d) Pliushkin and Chichikov Chapter 6.  In the Shadow Realm of Lies

163 163 164 166 169 171

Part Three:  Chichikov’s Punishment Chapter 7.  Judgment and Rumor 1. The Victory of the Lie before the Worldly Court  a) Worldly and Heavenly Courts b) Chichikov before the Worldly Court  c) Lying Rules  d) From Master to Slave of the Imagination  2. The Crowning of the Lie and the Banishing of Truth a) Drama, Fama, Rumor b) Scandal and Feast c) The Crowning of the Lie d) The Banishing of Truth  3. The Traducing of the Lie by Rumor a) The Judgment of Rumor b) Fama—Masculine and Feminine c) The Hermeneutics of Rumor d) Fama as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy 4. The Defense of the Lie by the Lie as Art  a) The Twelfth Chapter of Dead Souls b) “Neither Hand nor Foot”: Captain Kopeikin c) The Poet’s “Monkey” d) To the Devil with Truth! 5. The Banishing of the Lie by the Lie Autonomous a) The Knot Untied b) Chichikov’s First Corpse: The Public Prosecutor c) Beyond the Competence of the Worldly Court  d) Closing Circles  Chapter 8.  The Five Acts of the Drama Chapter 9.  Ethos and Epic: Chichikov’s Crime and Punishment

175 177 181 181 183 185 186 189 189 191 193 196 201 201 204 208 210 211 211 213 215 217 219 219 222 224 225 227 232

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List of Sources for Illustrations 239 Bibliography241 A. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol 241 B. Evil  247 C. Lying and Rumor 251 D. Feasting and Scandal 252 E. General Literature  253 Index261

Acknowledgments

For the revised American edition of my study of Gogol’s Dead Souls I am indebted in the first place to the Stiftung Geisteswissenschaften International (German International Humanities Foundation), whose generous funding of the English translation made the project possible in the first place. To Lazar Fleishman I am deeply grateful for accepting the work into his series “Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History.” And I must repeat my thanks here to my colleagues and fellow workers at the Institute of Slavic Studies in Heidelberg and Trier, who supported the original German edition of this book with their bibliographical and specialist academic knowledge and skills: Cristina Beretta, Keti Megrelishvili, Frauke Mekelburg, Łucja Minakowska, Aleksandra Petojević, Renate Thesen, Hans-Peter Wessel, Marina Yordanova, and Rumjana Zlatanova. For the new American edition they have been joined by Nina Penkert and Irina Podtergera, to whom I also extend my sincere thanks. In both content and style the original German text owes a lot to the critical acumen of Eckhard and Helga Heftrich, Pavel Kouba, Guido and Frank Pressler, and most especially Bettina Kaibach, to all of whom I again here express my profound gratitude, as I do to my academic teacher and guide, Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, who has been an inspiration to me for decades. A final acknowledgment must go to Joseph Swann for the patience, sensitivity, and humor with which he has borne the months spent in translating. It’s been a pleasure to work with you, Joe! Bol′shoe spasibo.

Figure 1. Gogol reads from Dead Souls (sketch by E. Mamonov, 1839)

Foreword

On October 31, 2016, in the final stages of Hillary Clinton’s electoral campaign, the German Huffington Post printed an article that unfortunately remained entirely unread in America. “Obama and Clinton,” its author wrote, “should insist that Trump … finally presents his birth certificate”: Then everyone would see what so far no one has noticed: Trump is from top to toe a Russian invention. He was not born in 1946 in Queens but in 1842 in a Russian novel: in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. There, where he first saw the light of day, he was not called Trump but Nozdrev and instead of an iconic forelock he had iconic side whiskers. This Nozdrev, Gogol tells us, “in a certain respect, was a man of affairs: there was nary a gathering at which he was present where things got along without an affair.” Either “his own cronies would be compelled to heave him out,” or “he would lie such a blue streak that he himself would become conscience-stricken. And he would tell a pack of lies utterly without any need for it.” Nozdrev is a notorious troublemaker. At the Governor’s ball he sits down on the dance floor and grabs at the dancers “by their skirts and coat flaps.” To disrupt a benefit dinner at the Waldorf Astoria would be a small matter for such a man. And he lies so habitually that he doesn’t even notice it. If he’s caught out he turns the point round and cries reflexively “You lie, you lie”—or in Donaldese “Wrong! Wrong!” Language, for Nozdrev, has only one purpose: to defeat—to trump—his opponent. Words do not simply “crumble in his mouth like moldy fungi”: far worse, they turn into their opposite. “There’s the boundary!” he says, gesturing across his land. “Everything that you see on this side is all mine,” and continues blithely “and even on the other side … it’s all mine, too.” Does Trump, when he speaks of Mexican border walls, perhaps mean the same thing? That the Donald is a comic figure has not halted his progress. But to become president of the USA he must prove that he really comes from

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Duckburg, Calisota and not from the pen of a Russian satirist. That could be difficult.1 Could Donald Trump’s election have been stopped if Hillary Clinton had read Dead Souls? Did Nikolai Gogol see Donald coming? Was he gifted with prophetic foresight? Absurd questions! Yet there is something uncanny in the precision with which Gogol depicts the literary type of the liar and winner-at-all-costs, as we know him from recent history. Nor is this a one-off occurrence: again and again fiction and fact coincide with such force that the very mention of an author’s name, a literary scene, a character from a novel is enough to illuminate a current situation perfectly. When reality seems like a scene from Shakespeare or Dickens, when it is “Orwellian” or “Kafkaesque,” when we find ourselves in the “Heart of Darkness” or on a “Ship of Fools,” when we encounter a Don Quixote or a Tartuffe, we recognize the power of literature to capture reality so roundly, so succinctly that our own tongues fall mute in comparison. The masters of world literature, and not just they, the artists, the film directors … a Goya … a Hitchcock … mold our perceptions, embodying complex experience in a few strokes of pen or brush, the compass of a lens. Bearing their personal imprint, these images are sent out into the world, a rich coinage of experience that in the most telling cases may remain in circulation for centuries. Yes, we may well find on an old Russian ruble the head of a grotesque American president. This has nothing to do with prophecy. For what region, then, may the author of Dead Souls claim rights of coinage? Opinions on this point have changed markedly in the 180 years of the novel’s currency, nor is there today any general agreement. Gogol’s immediate contemporaries disputed as to whether Dead Souls was a calumnious Little Russian (that is, Ukrainian) assault on the Motherland for which the author should be sent to Siberia—the view of his conservative opponents2—or, on the contrary, a Great Russian rewriting of the Homeric epics, as his Slavophile friends in the circle of Sergei and Konstantin Aksakov maintained. Or was the work not rather an anatomically faithful image of the pathological system of serfdom, as the leftleaning critic Vissarion Belinsky proposed and Alexander Herzen seconded? 1 Urs Heftrich, “The Donald: Russe oder Entenhausener?” (The Donald: Russian or Duckburger?), Huffington Post: The Blog, posted October 31, 2016. 2 See Edyta M. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol. Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 237, who quotes Sergei Aksakov’s recollection that a certain Count Tolstoy (not to be mistaken for the famous writer) “voiced a widely circulating opinion by calling Gogol an ‘enemy of Russia’ who deserved to be sent to Siberia in shackles.”

Foreword

Belinsky read Gogol’s novel as a realistic representation of Russian provincial life, including some of its basest aspects, and did not hesitate to dub Gogol the founder of a new epoch, the “Natural School” of Russian literature.3 The image of Gogol as a satirist was reinforced in the minds of his readers by Alexander Agin’s hundred illustrations to Dead Souls (1846–1847) in the spirit of Honoré Daumier caricatures. These became particularly popular in Soviet editions of the work, although Gogol himself had rejected outright the offer of using them.4 For the utilitarian materialist group around Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev, Gogol remained a firm realist, a view sanctified into Soviet doctrine by Lenin: a socially critical Gogol ridiculing the institution of serfdom was the only one the Communist Kremlin might tolerate.5 That for Gogol serfdom was as sacred as tsardom and the Church—such sobering truths were whisked away by the wand of Marxist dialectic, and if that did not help, then by the rod of censorship. The Symbolists and Russian Formalists, for their part, rejected simple-­ minded sociological readings of this kind and elevated Gogol into the apotheosis of their respective concepts of literature. Their aims, however, were different: the Symbolist group, following Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, sought to rehabilitate Gogol as a religious thinker, while the Formalists, with Boris Eikhenbaum,

3 For an excellent account of the polarized debate about Dead Souls see ibid., 236–253; for a brief survey see Sergei A. Goncharov, ed., N. V. Gogol′: pro et contra, compiled and introduction by S. A. Goncharov, comments by N. N. Akimova and K. G. Isupov (St. Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo Russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2009), 27–31, and the documents collected in his volume (see also John Schillinger’s entry on the Natural School in Victor Terras, ed., Handbook of Russian Literature [New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1985], 293–295). The longevity of Belinsky’s highly biased account of Gogol’s intentions is proven even by fairly recent, serious publications on Russian culture. As if it were an accomplished fact, Rosalind Gray, for instance, states in her—otherwise very illuminating—book that “The ‘Natural School’ was noted for its critical analysis of Russian ‘low-life’—the downtrodden, ‘little man’ of the town and of the country—as well as of polite society, and Gogol in particular portrayed with ruthless perspicacity the idiosyncrasies of a variety of social classes” (Rosalind P. Gray, Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000], 55). The quasi-sociological gaze ­attributed to Gogol here was typical for some of his leftist admirers, but it was not his way of seeing things at all. 4 See Gogol’s letter to Pletnev of March 20, 1846 (XIII, 45). Rosalind Gray comments: “Gogol’s churlish response suggests that the admiration which the illustrators had for his satire was not reciprocated” (Gray, Russian Genre Painting, 132). What Gogol did not appreciate was more likely that they only understood his multilayered prose on a satirical level. 5 For a critical survey of international scholarship on Gogol see Birgit Seidel-Dreffke, Die Haupttendenzen der internationalen Gogol’forschung in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (deutschsprachiges Gebiet, USA, Großbritannien, Sowjetunion) (Frankfurt/M.: Haag und Herchen, 1992).

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shunned ideology and concentrated on unraveling the author’s literary workmanship.6 One thing they all shared, however, was a fascination for the hidden structures in Gogol’s work, and it was in analyzing these that they began to appreciate his artistic achievement. The pioneering study by the Symbolist Andrei Bely bears its program in its title: he set out to show exactly where Masterstvo Gogolia (Gogol’s Mastery) lay.7 Himself a master of the music of language, of grotesque hyperbole and the architectonics of novel structure, Bely provides from the perspective of a fellow writer an inner view of the mechanisms on which Gogol’s prose relies. With his book, published in the year of his death (1934), genuinely critical research into Dead Souls began—the analysis of form in the quest for meaning, in the clear realization that the one can never be had without the other. In that same year Stalin decreed the founding of the Union of Soviet Writers, under whose aegis Russian literature was nailed down to the socialist-­realist dogma known as sotsrealism. As a result, any facets of Dead Souls beyond the sociocritical line sketched out by Belinsky and repeated ad nauseam by S­ oviet critics were, in the following decades, mostly explored outside R ­ ussia, often by the Revolution’s exiles. A puzzling new dimension was opened up by psychoanalysis, much to the discomfiture of Soviet orthodoxy, which found two good reasons to oppose it. In the first place, a Gogol who plumbs the subconscious depths is willy-nilly closer to Romanticism than to Realism; and, secondly, dabbling of this kind brings to light, in coded form, aspects that were as taboo in the nineteenth century as they were in the USSR—namely the author’s supposed (or suspected) homosexuality (Simon Karlinsky).8 With time, psychoanalytic and Marxist interpretations began in one respect to converge: their predictability—the hermeneutic trick of conjuring from the text whatever their doctrine had induced them to place in it. As far as Dead Souls is concerned, a far richer source of insight was provided by the exiled writer Andrei Sinyavsky with his psychology of creativity (In Gogol’s Shadow, 1975/2021).9

6 See Dimitrij Mereschkowskij, Gogol und der Teufel, trans. Alexander Eliasberg (Hamburg and Munich: Ellermann, 1963); and Boris Eichenbaum, “Wie Gogols ‘Mantel’ gemacht ist,” in his Aufsätze zur Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur, selected and trans. Alexander Kaempfe (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1965), 119–142. 7 See Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, ed. D. Chizhevskii (Munich: Fink, 1969). 8 See Simon Karlinsky, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton, with Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures,” California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 169–186. 9 See Andrej Sinjawskij, Im Schatten Gogols, trans. S. Geier (Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna: Propyläen, 1979).

Foreword

It was to a great extent thanks to emigrés such as Dmitrii Chizhevsky that Russian Formalism began to bear fruit in Gogol research in the West. Chizhevsky’s Gogol is a much-traveled literary and theological Romantic seeking with his symbolically charged textual constructs a firm hold in the antinomies of faith and of his own soul.10 That a work of art like Dead Souls is more a dialogue with world literature than a slice of Russian reality (which Gogol in any case preferred to view, while working on the novel, over a dish of maccaroni in an Italian café),11 has been amply demonstrated by Carl Proffer (on Gogol’s Homeric tracks), Gavriel Shapiro (on his Baroque leanings), Richard Peace (on his mockery of Sentimentalism), and Mikhail Vaiskopf (with a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of conceivable sources).12 After the 1960s some nonconformist spirits in the Soviet Union dared to broach more fundamental issues of Gogol’s poetics: Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, albeit only sketchily, in an essay on “Rabelais and Gogol”; Iury Lotman, more substantially, on Gogol’s concept of space; and finally Iury Mann in extenso in his Poetika Gogolia (Gogol’s Poetics) and Igor Zolotussky in a biography audacious enough to take Gogol’s religious sentiments seriously.13 Western research since that time has left scarcely a stone of literary theory unturned with respect to Gogol: Hans Günther on his technique of the grotesque, Jurij Striedter on the picaresque, Donald Fanger and Anne Louns­ bery on the text-reader relation, Robert Maguire on the poetic word, Susanne Fusso on disruptive disorder, Susi Frank on the sublime, Árpád Kovács on metapoetic elements, and Christian von Tschilschke, Frederick Griffiths, and Stanley Rabinowitz on Gogol’s confusing classification of Dead Souls as a “poem.”

10 See Dmitrij Tschižewskij, “Gogol’ Studien,” in Gogol’—Turgenev—Dostoevskij—Tolstoj. Zur russischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Ulrich Busch et al. (Munich: Fink, 1966), 57–126. 11 Vladimir Nabokov reports on Gogol’s gargantuan appetite: “none had sucked in such a number of macaroni or eaten so many cherry pies as this thin little man” (Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolay Gogol’ [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973], 3). 12 See Carl R. Proffer, The Simile and Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967); Gavriel Shapiro, Nikolaj Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Richard Peace, The Enigma of Gogol. An Examination of the Writings of N. V. Gogol and Their Place in the Russian Literary Tradition (Cambridge, London, New York, et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Mikhail Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia. Morfologiia. Ideologiia. Kontekst (Moscow: Radiks, 1993). 13 See Michail Bachtin, “Rabelais und Gogol’. Die Wortkunst und die Lachkultur des Volkes,” in his Die Ästhetik des Wortes, ed. Rainer Grübel (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 338–348; Iurii Lotman, Khudozhestvennoe prostranstvo v proze Gogolia, in his V shkole poeticheskogo slova. Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol′ (Moscow: Proveshchenie, 1988), 251–293; Iurii V. Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978); and Igor′ P. Zolotusskii, Gogol′, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1984).

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All this, and much more that cannot be noted here has been researched14—an abundance that has turned attention away from a simple mimetic understanding of Gogol’s art to its genuinely literary qualities. And what more could a literary scholar want? Well, there is one thing, perhaps—the naïve pleasure in recognizing the features of an all-too-familiar reality enjoyed by the Russian public of 1842—and then, too, the delicious shudder of comparing a novelistic figure with an election candidate of 2016 soon to become an all-too-real president. Where have such reactions gone? Even those like Jochen-Ulrich Peters or Edyta Bojanowska,15 who still today read Dead Souls primarily as satire, no longer do so in the unreflected manner of a Belinsky, but in full awareness of the more than a century-and-a-half 14 See Hans Günther, Das Groteske bei N. V. Gogol’ (Formen und Funktionen) (Munich: Sagner, 1968); Jurij Striedter, Der Schelmenroman in Rußland. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des russischen Romans vor Gogol’ (Berlin: Harrassowitz, 1961); Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susanne Fusso, Designing Dead Souls. An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Susi K. Frank, Der Diskurs des Erhabenen bei Gogol’ und die longinische Tradition (Munich: Fink, 1999); Christian von Tschilschke, Epen des Trivialen. N. V. Gogols “Die toten Seelen” und G. Flauberts “Bouvard und Pécuchet”. Ein struktureller und thematischer Vergleich (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996); Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak (Boston: Academic Studies Press), 2011; Árpád Kovács, “K voprosam metapoetiki Gogolja (Smyslovoj masshtab ‘Mertvykh dush’ i ‘Revizora’),” Slavica Tergestina 23 (2019): 64–128; and Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art. Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). 15 See Jochen Ulrich Peters, “Die Transformation des Schelmenromans: N. V. Gogol’: Mertvye duši,” in his Tendenz und Verfremdung. Studien zum Funktionswandel des russischen satirischen Romans im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Bern et al.: Lang, 2000), 65–100. and Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol. Bojanowska sees Gogol’s post-factum explanation that the characters in Dead Souls were a mirror of his own soul—parallel to his (equally post-factum) interpretation of The Government Inspector—as an “effort … to diffuse the politics of his play by transforming it into a staging of a spiritual battle between good and evil” (Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol, 252, see also ibid., 240). This shows only too well the fundamental difference between these latest approaches to a political reading of Dead Souls and the interpretation proposed in the present study, where the spiritual battle between good and evil is taken to be Gogol’s main concern—not just a pretext to soften the blow of satire. Bojanowska (ibid., 249–250) goes on to demonstrate convincingly that Gogol’s foreword to the second edition of Dead Souls (1846) reveals patterns of thought “typical of medieval prefaces, most typically in saints’ lives that he was reading at the time, in which monk-scribes proclaimed their own sinfulness.” This she sees as “[p]laying the fool … a defensive strategy not uncommon to Ukrainian writers” (ibid., 250). One might, however, conclude, on the contrary, that Gogol was serious in both respects: in his interest in the lives of the saints and in his foreword—or, to draw a further conclusion from Bojanowska’s perceptive remark, that Gogol’s thought was in fact a good deal more medieval than his contemporaries could, or we moderns might like to, believe.

Foreword

of debate around this predicate. Gogol’s epic has become an arena where exegetes and schools compete for the interpretive prize. Is Dead Souls, then, a sort of “literature squared,” a playground of genres and discourses, a cemeterial dialogue between Gogol’ and the great spirits of the past, from Homer and Dante to Schiller and his own mentor, Pushkin, who gave him the idea for the book but died before it was finished? The answer to both parts of this question must be: “Yes, absolutely.” Gogol’s novel is all these things, and Gogol, steeped in world literature, knew it to be so. But his ambition could not be stilled by the mere role of a writer’s writer.16 In essence Gogol’s Dead Souls undoubtedly follows the intention attributed to it by Belinsky & Co: to capture in a precisely polished mirror the distorted reality of his day, so that all would see its faults. But Gogol’s mirror was polished very differently from anything the critics could imagine: he had a different picture of reality, and evil, for him, had a different root. His mirror had more of Hieronymus Bosch in it than of his contemporary Honoré Daumier, like the looking glass in the wayside inn where his hero re-encounters Nozdrev: “a mirror that reflected instead of two eyes twice that number and, instead of the face, some sort of wafer or other.”17 Rather than any large-scale “physiological sketch” of Russian reality, Dead Souls pens the chiaroscuro of a Hoffmannesque “landscape of the soul.” But— and there lies the innovatory quality of Gogol’s presentation—it is a pattern of light and darkness that fades before the reader’s eyes into ever finer shades of gray. Gogol saw evil not in the social conditions of reality but in the human soul, his own included. Chichikov, the hero of his novel, travels only superficially through the Russia of his day; in reality, his journey is inward—and, at the same time (as will become evident), backward and down. In plotting Chichikov’s progress Gogol made what was probably his most original discovery as a writer: he created a literary model of the banality of 16 Gogol was extraordinarily keen on being widely circulated in print; as Lounsbery, Thin Culture, 127, points out, he himself “declared his hope that eventually his audience would comprise ‘half of literate Russia.’” On the other hand, he was well aware of the risks involved in being read by an uneducated public with its “potentially fatal power over the artist” (ibid., 144). 17 Such is the mirror that Gogol describes in the fourth chapter of Dead Souls: “зеркало, показывавшее вместо двух четыре глаза, а вместо лица какую-то лепешку” (VI, 62). For Gogol and Bosch, see the instructive comparison in Alexander P. Obolensky, “Gogol and Hieronymus Bosch,” Zapiski akademicheskoi gruppy v SShA 17 (1984): 115–132. Daumier’s caricatures influenced the “Natural school” (see Gray, Russian Genre Painting, 55; and see note 3 above). Both artists depicted mirrors in their work; compare, for example, the figure of Vanity looking into a mirror in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503/04) with Daumier’s lithographic caricature of a woman in front of a mirror (in the cycle Les bas bleus, January 30, 1844).

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evil. In Dead Souls he claimed the trivial—that depressingly inescapable but unfortunately all too real province of human activity—as his sovereign domain. Hardly by chance, it took another writer of global standing to congratulate him adequately on his discovery: Vladimir Nabokov, an entire sub-section of whose 1944 book on Gogol is dedicated to the phenomenon of poshlost′.18 The depiction of poshlost′ in Dead Souls—of this we can be sure—would have struck Nabokov as one of those moments in literature noted above, replete with the fascinated horror of unmasked reality. At the same time he would have recognized the immense challenge facing an author who sought to present evil in its unspectacular, trivial guise. Hegel had already remarked on this in his Lectures on Aesthetics: “That which is purely negative is in itself dull and flat. … Cruelty and misfortune … can perhaps be … borne, if they are … elevated by an appropriate greatness of character and purpose; but evil as such, envy, cowardice, meanness, is invariably repulsive. That is why the devil is such a poor, aesthetically useless figure.”19 And Hegel’s pupil Rosenkranz, who wrote an entire Aesthetics of the Ugly, could only conceive of “the evil and ugly as dwindling to nothing within the great, God-given order of the world. Removed from this context it is aesthetically worthless.”20 Even Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” was convinced that in the face of such manifestations “words fail and … thought dissolves.”21 After Gogol, the difficult—indeed seemingly paradoxical—task of portraying evil in its everyday triviality was taken up with great persistence by the Russian prose writers of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries: Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Saltykov‑Shchedrin, Chekhov, and Sologub. Walter Rehm, through his reading of the great Russians, became convinced that no genre was better fitted to meet this challenge than the novel: Even when, as if imbibing some slowly working nutrient, it seeks to absorb the negative, the dangerous, the counter-epical, it has 18 Chapter 3 (“Our Mr. Chichikov”), 2, in Nabokov, Nikolay Gogol, 63–74. See also below, 12–16. 19 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 13, 288. Hegel’s statement is indebted on the one hand to the traditional conception of evil as privatio boni, on the other to the Hegelian dialectic. “In Hegel’s dialectic, the negative is an element which can be, and is, resolved in a process within whose entirety the positive qualities of truth and wholeness are restored” (Christoph Schulte, Radikal böse. Die Karriere des Bösen von Kant bis Nietzsche, 2nd ed. [Munich: Fink, 1991], 247). 20 Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen, edited and afterword by Dieter Kliche (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 39; specifically for his critique of Hegel’s dictum cited above, see ibid., 287f. 21 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen (Munich: Piper, 1964), 300.

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a salvific function—even when … as in Gogol’s Dead Souls, it is bent on depicting the unseemly morass of the nugatory, the abysmal cold of those broken everyday characters with their rigid, unfeeling, inwardly impoverished spectral semblance of being; when it paints in rich colors the meanness and boredom, the vacuous inactivity of disjointed human life and, finding its archetype in the idleness of a provincial Russian town, extends the image with demonic energy to the entire world—even then the novel remains true to its task.22 Rehm’s thesis goes far beyond the immediate question whether the portrayal of the triviality of evil can be of aesthetic value. What is at stake here is nothing less than the relation between epic form and ethical content—an issue treated most effectively to date by medievalists. Medieval epics tend to revolve around an ethical pattern as their central organizing principle. The sequence of the main hero’s adventures is determined by a moral code whose validity manifests itself through a dialectical process in which this moral is alternately breached and re-established. The order of the literary form and the ethical core of what is represented by this form are thus mutually dependent.23 To ask about “the moral of the story” was long taboo in modern literary ­criticism—for good reason. Literature worthy of its name is not Sunday-school reading. Not accidentally, the one thing about Mark Twain’s Sunday school that really stuck in his memory was not the teacher’s lessons, but his “thumb nail which remained permanently twisted and distorted and curved and pointed, like a parrot’s beak.”24 The twisted, the distorted, the curved, the pointed— this is what makes literature so much more exciting than any sermon; and who among the Russian writers of the nineteenth century better illustrates this than Nikolai Gogol? Yet, just as Mark Twain admitted to being a moralist, albeit in

22 Walter Rehm, “Gontscharow und die Langeweile” (Goncharov on boredom), in his Experimentum Medietatis. Studien zur Geistes- und Literaturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Rinn, 1947), 96–183 (here: 115–116). Rehm counts Dead Souls, of course, as a novel. Gogol himself used several different terms, referring to it within the work itself as poema—which in Russian usage can also mean a lengthy poem or epic—but also sometimes as a story: povest′; in his letters, on the other hand, he called it a novel: roman (see Tschilschke, Epen des Trivialen, 19). So long as technical issues of genre are not explicitly involved, the present study does not require a strict distinction between epic and novel either; in that respect Gogol’s practice can be followed and the term “epic” can be used where applicable, for example, to highlight Gogol’s intention of linking up with the Homeric tradition. 23 See below, note 29. 24 Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography, chap. 26.

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disguise, so Gogol, too, had a propensity for teaching us mores—a trait that well fitted his taste for the ludicrous, the grotesque, the absurd. We may or may not value his moral lessons, but we should acknowledge that the author of The Nose was a bluenose author. Gogol was a moralist-writer in an emphatic ­sense—the epithet inseparable from the noun. Ethics is part and parcel not only of his openly religious (and accordingly tedious) texts, it is woven into the fabric of his most daring prose, his funniest play. The plea for an ethical reading of Gogol’s writings should not be mistaken for a naïve return to Plato’s equation of the Beautiful and the Good, or to the Sundayschool question: What do the scriptures teach us? Virtually all of Gogol’s teachings are anathema to the author of this study. There is another way of putting the question though: What did the author want to teach us, for what reasons, and with what artistic means? We should acknowledge the fact that literature has always been a tool of indoctrination, whether we like its message or not. This is where we leave Sunday school and enter a debate that has gained traction under the label of “ethical criticism” since the mid-1980s.25

25 For the renewed interest in the relationship between aesthetics and ethics see among others (in chronological order): Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Entwurf einer Theorie des literarischen Gebildes (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1975); New Literary History 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): Literature and/as Moral Philosophy; Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1983–1985); Joseph Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988); Paul Ricoeur, S­ oi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1990); Peter Baker, Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995); Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism. Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn. A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Mark W. Roche, Die Moral der Kunst. Über Literatur und Ethik (Munich: Beck, 2002); Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics. Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mark W. Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Jutta Zimmermann and Britta Salheiser, eds., Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006); Thomas Claviez, Aesthetics & Ethics. Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “House Made of Dawn” (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008); Christine Lubkoll and Oda Wischmeyer, “Ethical Turn”? Geisteswissenschaften in neuer Verantwortung (Munich and Paderborn: Fink, 2009); Dorothea Scholl, “Ethik und Ästhetik zwischen Humanismus und Posthumanismus: Überlegungen zur ethischen Literaturanalyse in der Langzeitperspektive,” Interlitteraria 14, no. 1 (2009): 7–28; Volker Kapp and Dorothea Scholl, eds., Literatur und Moral (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2011); Nora Hämäläinen, Literature and Moral Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

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In the almost forty years since then, the distinct—though not ­impermeable— line drawn by Kant between ethics and aesthetics has become increasingly punctuated, and punctured.26 With the “ethical turn” we have witnessed a growing interest in the question where exactly morals meets (or overlaps) with art. Wittgenstein’s formula: “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” has become popular among scholars: “Goodness knows nothing of beauty” is no longer the only valid password for entering a discussion on moral and artistic values.27 It would be hard to express the interdependence of ethics and aesthetics in the literary field more succinctly than in Paul Ricoeur’s dictum: “There is no ethically neutral narrative.”28 This holds particularly true for the literary genre that has always been perceived as the ideal tool for teaching the value system of a society: the epic29—and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is a case in point. Here the interface of epic and ethics is particularly intimate: even in the finely woven threads of the subplots that hold this extraordinarily tautly structured text together, the indissoluble discursive bond is immediately visible. It is as if the supreme aesthetic impact of Gogol’s novel lies precisely in the stringency with which it pursues its central moral issue. In other words, Dead Souls is yet another example of what Edith Clowes has shown as a hallmark of Russian literature, it is “a creative internalization of philosophical discourse in the framework of fictional narrative.”30 The present study has a clear aim: to lay bare the ethical ground-plan of Gogol’s Dead Souls, a plan that underlies the entire work and determines its finest details. My approach has two steps: Part One, “Chichikov’s Prehistory,” seeks a solution—a recurrent theme in Slavonic studies since Andrei Bely—to

26 In §59 of his Critique of Judgment, Kant calls Beauty “the symbol of morality”, and further elaborates: “Now, I say, the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and only in this light … does it give us pleasure with an attendant claim to the agreement of every one else, whereupon the mind becomes conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above mere sensibility to pleasure from impressions of sense, and also appraises the worth of others on the score of a like maxim of their judgement” (transl. by James Creed Meredith). 27 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.421. The second quote is from W. Gass, “Goodness Knows Nothing of Beauty: On the Distance between Morality and Art,” Harper’s Magazine 274 (1987): 37–44. 28 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 115. 29 In the foregoing lines and above (see note 23) the author has used material from his prior article, “Epic as Ethics: Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls,” Studia Slavica Savariensia 1–2 (2008): 109–123. 30 Edith W. Clowes, Fiction’s Overcoat. Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 5. In the title of this magisterial book on the relationship between Russian literature and philosophy, Clowes alludes to Gogol through Dostoevsky’s famous, though only alleged, dictum, “We all came out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’”

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the system of five estate owners visited by Chichikov, the novel’s protagonist, on his travels in provincial Russia. It will be shown that Gogol furnished his work with a key to this sequence of characters in the form of a biographical sketch of his protagonist in Chapter Eleven. Dismissed by most critics as so much ballast,31 Chichikov’s prehistory not only dovetails perfectly with the series of estate owners but provides a key to a fuller understanding of the action and meaning of the novel. The second step is devoted—in two movements: Part Two, “Chichikov’s Crime,” and Part Three, “Chichikov’s Punishment”—to the systematic exposition of this meaning. It will be argued that the two polar forces sustaining the architecture of the novel are truth and untruth (or lie). Here Gogol echoes a long tradition of Western thought, which from Plato through Augustine to Kant set evil in close proximity to the lie. In that sense Dead Souls is infused with a veritable theology of truth: something that has not previously been appreciated in such explicit terms, but which can be distilled from Gogol’s text as its main structural principle—albeit one that must then be related back to the characters and action of the novel, if one of Russian literature’s most vivid works is not to wither into a skeletal abstraction. For while Chichikov moves within a field of forces that can be expressed in timeless concepts, the important thing is that he moves, and in so doing traces the story of a life lived concretely in space and time. Dictated by the text itself, the biographical element is, in fact, so central to the interpretation of Dead Souls in its received form (that is, the completed first part of the planned trilogy) that it can be read as a novel of development, an entwicklungsroman, in disguise—an idea first mooted by Dmitry Chizhevsky, who, however, considered that this classification was only really applicable in light of the fragments we have of the novel in its continuation.32 In terms of technique, nothing more is needed to demonstrate the interpenetration of plot and moral development in the first part of Dead Souls than traditional analytic procedures: setting recurrent motifs in relation to each other and observing the resultant symbolic construct. This method, first

31 There was one exception though: in Syn otechestva 6 (1842), K. P. Masalsky began his review of Dead Souls with Chichikov’s biography. Lounsbery, Thin Culture, 134, is certainly right to call this critic “obtuse,” but I would like to add: even this blind rooster found a grain of corn! 32 See Dmitrij Tschižewskij, “The Unknown Gogol,” The Slavonic Review 30 (1951): 482; see also Tschižewskij’s study of Comenius’s Labyrinth of the World, which mentions Dead Souls and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in the same breath (idem, “Das Labyrinth der Welt und Paradies des Herzens des Jan Amos Comenius. Die Thematik und die Quellen des Werkes,” in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. 2: Bohemica, 92–139 [Munich: Fink, 1972], 103).

Foreword

consistently applied to Gogol’s novel by James Woodward,33 will at the same time lay bare the novel’s medieval and baroque roots. To embark on a decoding of Gogol’s complex weft of motifs in Dead Souls is to read the book with new eyes: no longer as social satire but on an abstract level as a covert theology34 and on the level of its human players as a tale of transgression and retribution—not least, in this respect, the tale of Gogol’s own sense of guilt and his desire for atonement, his crime and punishment as its author. Heidelberg, May 2021

33 See James B. Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 34 See Peter Thiergen, whose inspiring reading of Gogol’s Overcoat in light of the Sermon on the Mount vindicates his own statement that “19th-century Russian literature can in many cases be read as a hidden theology” (Peter Thiergen, “Gogol’s ‘Mantel’ und die Bergpredigt,” in Gattungen in den slavischen Literaturen. Beiträge zu ihren Formen in der Geschichte. Festschrift für Alfred Rammelmeyer, ed. Hans Bernd Harder and Hans Rothe [Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1998], 396). On “narrative theology” (H. Weinrich) in general see also D. Mieth, Dichtung, Glaube und Moral. Studien zur Begründung einer narrativen Ethik (Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald, 1976).

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Figure 2. Hell’s torments for gossips (nineteenth-century Russian image)

Figure 3. Hell’s torments for liars and blasphemers (nineteenth-century Russian image)

Introduction: Of Beauty, Truth, and Evil

1.  Truth and Madness These great writers, for example, Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol … given what they perforce are … souls in which some fracture or other calls out for concealment; often taking revenge in their works for an inner defilement; often seeking forgetfulness in their lofty flights from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the edge of the swamp— Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner1 “‘Gogol has gone mad!’ We crowd round and see his fearfully distorted face, eyes aglow flickering wildly, hair standing on end—how he falls to the ground gnashing his teeth, frothing at the mouth, convulsing himself, breaking the ­furniture—Gogol is mad!”2 A convincing depiction of an occurrence that was pure schoolboy foolery put on to avoid castigation. Gogol’s teachers were evidently taken in and sent him off to hospital for two months.3 A quarter of a century later, in 1847, Gogol published his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a work the by then celebrated author of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls regarded as his “first book worth anything.”4 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich, Berlin, and New York: De Gruyter, 1980), vol. 6, 434. 2 “‘Гоголь взбесился! …’ Сбежались мы, и видим, что лицо у Гоголя страшно исказилось, глаза сверкают каким‑то диким блеском, волосы натопорщились, скрегочет зубами, пена изо рта, падает, бросается и бьет мебель—взбесился!” (T. G. Pashchenko, “Cherty iz zhizni Gogolia,” in S. I. Mashinskii, ed., Gogol′ v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1952], 43). 3 N. V. Kukol′nik gives a somewhat different account of the event than Pashchenko (see Vikentii V. Veresaev, Gogol′ v zhizni. Sistematicheskii svod podlinnykh svidetel′stv sovremennikov, in his Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Moskovskij Rabochi, 1990), vol. 3, 359; see also Rolf Dietrich Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985], 24). 4 In his letter to Shevyrev (October 5, 1846) Gogol writes: “Это первая моя дельная книга” (XIII, 106).

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Critical voices disagreed. The Western-leaning Belinskij considered it a case of “religious mania” and appealed to the author: “You are either ill, in which case you should seek an immediate cure, or … I dare not utter my thoughts!”5 Gogol’s friend, Sergei Aksakov, wrote: “… he has gone mad, no doubt about it, but there is a lot of nonsense in his madness. … Mad people are in their own way rogues and conmen.”6 Mortified, Gogol felt “like a guilty schoolboy who has gone further than he actually meant to. I have dressed myself up in my book as such a khlestakov [trickster] that I dare not open it any more.”7 The motifs of trickery and madness run in strange companionship through Gogol’s biography from his schooldays right through to the end. The author of Diary of a Madman, whom one might well encounter sitting at his writing desk in a crimson velvet kokoshnik embroidered in gold (not unlike the headdress of Mordovian women),8 who suffered from temporary hallucinations9 and was convinced his stomach was upside down,10 before he finally starved himself to death—this author gave enough cause for doubts about his sanity. And although art and madness are among the most honorable couples in European intellectual history—after all, psychological suffering calls out for human sympathy—even Gogol’s well-wishers harbored misgivings about his honesty: “It can be put very simply,” Sergei Aksakov admitted: “Gogol can never be fully trusted.”11 Even when he laid bare his tormented soul with the exhibitionism of a fairground huckster—indeed especially then—his contemporaries suspected him of play-acting. Were his symptoms the genuine expression of an inwardly riven psyche or simply a clever mask? To his schoolmates he was already “the mysterious dwarf.”12   5 “Или Вы больны, и Вам надо спешить лечиться; или—не смею досказать моей мысли …” (VIII, 503; on Gogol’s religious mania see also VIII, 505).  6 “[О]н точно помешалса, в этом нет сомнения; но в самом помешательстве много плутовства. … Сумасшедшие бывают по своему плуты и надуватели” (S. T. Aksakov to I. S. Aksakov, February 8, 1847, in Vasilii V. Gippius, N. V. Gogol′. Materialy i issledovaniia [Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel′stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1936], vol. 1, 179).   7 “… как провинившийся школьник, что напроказил больше того, чем имел намерение. Я размахнулся в моей книге таким Хлестаковым, что не имею духу заглянуть в нее” (letter to Zhukovsky, March 6, 1847; XIII, 243).   8 See S. T. Aksakov, in Mashinskii, Gogol’ v vospominanijach sovremennikov, 112.   9 See S. T. Aksakov, ibid., 131. 10 See Veresaev, Gogol′ v zhizni, vol. 4, 156. 11 “Все, что можно сказать …, заключается в одном слове: не было полной доверенности к Гоголю” (Mashinskii, Gogol’ v vospominanijach sovremennikov, 197). 12 Dmitrij Tschižewskij, Russische Literaturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1: Die Romantik (Munich: Eidos, 1964), 99. In an early letter to his mother, Gogol admits that he seems something of a riddle to everyone; no one has yet fully deciphered him (letter of March 1, 1828; X, 123).

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Generations of researchers have sought to demystify the dwarf. The bevy of doctors that maltreated the dying writer with peppery essences, cold water applications, leeches, and Spanish flies, earnestly beseeching him: “Where does it hurt, Nikolai Vasilyevich? Tell us, tell us!”13 was succeeded by a host of variously commissioned or self-appointed analysts intent on posthumously scrutinizing the condition of Gogol’s soul.14 The question whether he “indulged to an excessive degree in onanism” (for Lombroso evidently a sign of genius),15 or struggled to hide his homosexuality (Karlinsky)16 or even necrophilism (Rozanov),17 is as fruitless for literary criticism as the more probable diagnosis that he suffered from manic depression (or what one would today call a bipolar disorder),18 unless it is linked with the further question: What makes art born of such suffering into art? The present study attempts to answer that question in terms of Gogol’s epic masterpiece Dead Souls—or more precisely in terms of the first (and only completed) volume of the trilogy he planned under that name. What we still by chance have of the second volume—which the author for good reason wanted to burn in its entirety—will only be referred to here and there in these pages as ancillary evidence.19 If one approaches Gogol in this way through his art—and especially through the work in which he wanted to give Russian literature a modern counterpart to Dante’s Divina Commedia and at the same time solve the mystery of his own existence20—then one will discover that he redeems this daunting claim 13 Tarasenkov, an eye-witness, cites the very zealous doctor Klimenkov with the words: “Что болит, Н. В.? А? Говорите же!” (A. T. Tarasenkov, in Mashinskii, Gogol’ v vospominanijach sovremennikov, 523). 14 D. A. Young, N. V. Gogol in Russian and Western Psychoanalytic Criticism (PhD diss., Toronto University, Toronto, 1977), provides a critical overview of the various diagnoses of Gogol’s illness. 15 See Cesare Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn (Leipzig: Reclam, 1887), 121. 16 See Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), passim, esp. 15–16. Critique on this point should in no way detract from Karlinsky’s achievement, as his work is still one of the most stimulating books on Gogol. 17 See ibid., 17. 18 See Natascha Drubek‑Meyer, Gogol’s eloquentia corporis. Einverleibung, Identität und die Grenzen der Figuration (Munich: Sagner, 1998, 292). 19 Horst‑Jürgen Gerigk justly observes: “While the few chapters of Part II of Dead Souls that by chance remain to us … call for a legitimate place in any critical edition of Gogol’s works, it seems out of the question to append them as an authentic continuation to the thoroughly polished first part of that work. … The disappointment one feels on reading this ‘continuation’ should never be blamed on Gogol’. Viewed honestly, whatever survived destruction should be deemed ‘apocrypha.’” (Horst‑Jürgen Gerigk, “Nikolaj Gogol: Die toten Seelen,” in Der russische Roman, ed. Bodo Zelinsky [Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1979], 87). 20 In his letter to Zhukovsky accompanying the manuscript of Volume One of Dead Souls, Gogol writes of the continuation of his opus magnum: “тогда только разрешится загадка моего существованья” (XII, 69).

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in far greater measure than literary scholarship has long understood. For behind the playful façade of Dead Souls stands an allegorical framework of a consistency and rigor that challenges that of the author’s medieval master, while its satirical cloak conceals a melancholy that pervades the tectonic structure of the work as it did that of Gogol’s own being. Dead Souls is not just an epic parable, it has the contours of a “radical autobiography” (Eckhard Heftrich).21 “Radical does not refer here to the revelation of personal intimacies, but to the disclosure of the roots of [Gogol’s] intellectual and artistic existence.”22 Having already pulled lightly at one of these roots, it is now perhaps time to bare it more fully—the question of Gogol’s problematic relationship with truth. A glance at his biography will help. Apart from a short Italian poem, Gogol’s literary career began with the verse idyll Hans Küchelgarten, which he quickly withdrew after it had been shredded by the critics. He bought up the entire printing, “burnt it in a hotel room hired specially for the purpose”23 (the first of many such autos-da-fé), and fled forthwith to Lübeck (the first of many foreign journeys). More interesting than this youthful poetic venture, however, is the letter he wrote to his mother justifying his panicky reaction. His approach was simple: to bury his creative failure in a wildly creative tale of its circumstances. In no less than six (printed) pages24 he wove a fiction of desperate, unrequited love to a nameless girl of veritably epiphanic impact; more honestly, he spoke of flight from himself, made a clean breast of his character defects,25 promised immediate moral regeneration, and ended the letter with a request for a 100 rubles (no less) to repay a friend whose coat he happened to have taken on his travels. For all its gross impertinence the letter has literary merit. Its style alone is worth analyzing: in no earlier letter does he draw on such a range of literary registers. But the next letter already contrives a new fiction: the real reason for the young man’s journey abroad is now a skin rash.26 Like Nozdrev’s in Dead Souls, Gogol’s lies begin to challenge belief, and his mother, drawing her own conclusions from his explanatory zeal, presumes he has contracted venereal disease.27

21 Eckhard Heftrich, “‘Doktor Faustus’: Die radikale Autobiographie,” in Thomas Mann 1875–1975. Vorträge in München; Zürich; Lübeck, ed. Beatrix Bludau, Eckhard Heftrich, and Helmut Koopmann (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1977), 140. 22 Ibid.; originally made of Thomas Mann, the statement can justifiably also be applied to Gogol. 23 Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol mit Selbstzeugnissen, 41. 24 Letter to his mother, July 24, 1829; X, 145–151. 25 “в этом признаюсь я от чистого сердца” (X, 149). 26 Letter to his mother, August 13, 1829 (new style calendar); X, 152. 27 Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol mit Selbstzeugnissen, 42.

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The flight abroad and the letters written to conceal it reveal a striking connection between Gogol’s reluctance to look truth in the face and his readiness to use his gifts as a writer to fool his audience. Literature and lies move into suspicious proximity and are joined by a third element already apparent in the letter from Lübeck: a tendency to self-castigation. Within this triangle Gogol is caught, and the longer he lives the tighter the shackles are drawn; in the end he sees lies everywhere. Rolf-Dietrich Keil has shown how Gogol even radicalizes the utterances of Scripture to support his pathos-charged idea of truth.28 Where the Apostle Paul writes “Let God be true though every man be false” (Rom. 3:4) and Thomas à Kempis—for Gogol always a key figure—extends this to “Man is full of lies and deception,” Gogol himself goes a step further. For him, “man as such … [is] a lie” (emphasis U.H.),29 and his own sphere of literature in particular becomes a prime suspect. The consequences of the exorbitant demands Gogol makes on his own truthfulness are not hard to see: the more readily words come to him, the more he fears the temptation to lie. Writing to the priest Matvei Konstantinovsky, who energetically sought to draw him away from secular literary pursuits, he admitted:30 “I would dearly say more, yet for that I would need many pages and might easily succumb to garrulousness,31 even to untruth. … The seductive spirit is so near and has so often betrayed me. …” Conversely, when he really seeks truth, words regularly fail him. Again he confesses to Matvei:

28 See Keil 1986 (b). The concept of Wahrheitspathos (“pathos of truth”) is taken from Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7, 496. 29 Rolf-Dietrich Keil, “Gogol’ im Spiegel seiner Bibelzitate,” in Festschrift für Herbert Bräuer zum 65. Geburtstag am 14. April 1986, ed. Reinhold Olesch and Hans Rothe (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1986), 206 passes over the mention of the Pauline text in Imitatio Christi book 3, chap. 45. 30 “Много мне бы хотелось сказать вам. Но это заняло бы страницы и весьма легко перешло бы в многословие, может быть, даже в ложь. … Дух‑обольститель так близок от меня и так часто меня обманывал” (letter to M. A. Konstantinovsky, April 21, 1848; XIV, 62). 31 For Gogol, loquaciousness or empty verbosity (mnogoslovie, prazdnoslovie) was an early stage of lying. He thus radicalized the position taken by the Russian Hesychasts, who perceived silence (as opposed to loquaciousness) as a prerequisite for comprehending the divine. In Dobrotoliubie, a work Gogol studied intensively, Petrus Damascenus repeatedly contrasts the divine word with mnogoslovie (see Dobrotoliubie ili slovesa i glavizny sviashtennago trezveniia, sobrannyia ot pisanii sviatykh i bogodukhnovennykh otets [Moscow, 1793], part 3, fol. 55v–58v and 61v–62v)—I am indebted to Hans Rothe for this observation. See also Augustine, in Sermo de silentio: “Verbositas enim quid aliud est, quam semen quod fructum non facit?” (What is verbosity other than a seed that bears no fruit?) (Aurelius Augustinus, Sancti Aurelii Augustini, Hipponensis Episcopi, Opera omnia, in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. Jacques Paul Migne, vol. 40 [Paris: Migne, 1887], 1239f.).

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There is so much I would like to say, but I scarcely move to take up my pen and I cannot. As if for manna from heaven I wait for a fresh breeze from above; all my senses are awake, expectant. God sees that I would write nothing that was not in praise of his Holy Name. I would like to show my ignorant brethren living in the world, who play with that life as if it were a game—I would like to show them in vital, living examples that life is not a game. I have thought everything through, it is all ready—and yet I cannot lift my pen.32 So when Gogol finally reaches the point of rejecting his whole literary creation up to that point as so much “scribbling,”33 the reason lies not in the work itself but in the exaggerated norms to which he subjects it—maximum demands that are clearly expressed in An Author’s Confession. He sets the standard of truth so high that no one could attain it. It is easy, then, for him to accuse himself of failure—and conversely to lend this failure an aura of grandeur: “I must know much more than any other author. Merely to leave out some details as if they were unimportant— the lie struck me more painfully in the face than it would another.”34 This pattern is not unfamiliar with depressive patients,35 and Gogol’s conception of truthfulness and lying fits remarkably well into an overall manicdepressive view of his personality. According to a recent study on the motif of lying and melancholy depersonalization, … some manic patients … seem to take particular pleasure in lying. If we consider their statements we often find them reproaching themselves for dishonesty—a hypercritical attitude which … can lead them to consider themselves liars and their religious 32 “Так много есть, о чем сказать, а примешься за перо—не подымается. Жду, как манны, орошающего орошенья свыше, все бы мои силы от него двигнулись. Видит бог, ничего бы не хотелось сказать, кроме того, что служит к прославленью его святого имени. Хотелось бы живо, в живых примерах, показать темной моей братии, живущей в мире, играющей жизнию, как игрушкой, что жизнь—не игрушка. И всё, кажется, обдумано и готово, но—перо не подымается” (letter to M. A. Konstantinovsky, late April 1850; XIV, 179). 33 “мо[и] прежни[е] марани[я]” (letter to Uvarov, late April 1845; XII, 484). 34 “Мне нужно было знать гораздо больше, сравнительно со всяким другим писателем, потому что стоило мне несколько подробностей пропустить, не принять в соображенье—и ложь у меня выступала ярче, нежели у кого другого” (VIII, 447; emphasis U. H.). 35 Alice Miller has described the interplay of depression and grandiosity in psychological terms (Alice Miller, Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst. Eine Umund Fortschreibung [Frankurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1994], 109–113).

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piety nothing but miserable hypocrisy. … Their entire past life may seem to them a bundle of lies.36 It is difficult not to think of Gogol when one reads such a description. What is even more interesting, however, is that not only the symptoms but also their projected cause could have been modeled on Gogol: The motif of lying is in most cases … connected with another phenomenon: a marked loss of feeling: … the melancholia anaesthetica … of older, or the alienation depression of more recent psychiatry. So does the motif of lying originate here in melancholy depersonalization? Then how does the melancholic come to see his loss of feeling …, indeed his whole condition and behavior, as a web of untruthfulness and lies? … In our opinion the motif of lying encapsulates a lack of selfhood perceived as pervading the entire domains of feeling, behavior and action.37 Complaints of “a sense of unfeeling” and “inner emptiness”38 are scattered throughout the correspondence of the young Gogol. Thus in 1827 he writes to a school friend: “I became ever colder until I could experience no warmth in anything that happened. … Since you left school my soul has been overcome with emptiness and lifelessness.”39 A little later he invokes the spirit of his dead father, who gives him “the ability to feel himself.”40 Still more revealing is a letter he wrote in 1833 to his mother, in which he urges her not to make the same “mistakes” in the upbringing of his youngest sister Olga as were made with the second youngest, Liza.41 With some justification the letter has been taken to shed light on Gogol’s later religious mania; but more than chronicling a traumatic experience, it reveals the outlines of an aesthetic-religious program that reaches as far as Dead Souls:

36 A. Kraus, “Lügenmotiv und Depersonalisation in der Melancholie,” in Phänomen; Struktur; Psychose, ed. Wolfram Schmitt and Wolfgang Hofmann (Regensburg: Roderer, 1992), 138. 37 Ibid., 140–142. 38 Ibid., 142, 141. 39 “Я холодал постепенно и разучался принимать жарко к себе всё сбывающееся. … С минут твоего выбытия в душе моей залегла пустота, какое‑то безжизненное чувство” (letter to G. I. Vysotsky, March 19, 1827; X, 84–85). 40 “дает дар чувствовать самого себя” (letter to his mother, March 24, 1827; X, 90). 41 Letter to his mother, October 2, 1833 (X, 280–283).

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Only one thing worries me: Liza’s character. … She … lacks … all strong feelings. … Be so good … as not to bring Olga up in the same way. … Do you know how strong childhood impressions are? The good habits and inclinations of the child become the virtues of the adult. Instill into her the precepts of religion: they are the foundation of everything. If Liza had felt the power of religion, one could have done anything with her. … A child’s feelings must be violently stirred, then it will long retain all that is of beauty. I speak from experience. … I remember how little I felt. … But once—I remember it as if it had happened today—I had asked you to tell me about the Last Judgment, and you recounted to me as a child so well, so plainly, so vividly the blessings awaiting those who lead a virtuous life, and you painted so fearsome and impressive a picture of the eternal torments of sinners, that I was profoundly shaken and all my sensibilities were aroused. So deep did this experience go that it later bore fruit within me in the noblest of thoughts.42 There can be little doubt that it was the pains of hell rather than the joys of the blessed that shook little Nikolai’s feelings awake so forcefully. At a general ­psychological level Gogol’s masochism can be explained in terms of the dependency of feeling as such on fantasies of punishment; but in his case this is embellished by an additional religious component. The statement that the power of religion will enable one to “do anything” with a young person—a formulation repeated almost verbatim in Dead Souls43—is actually rather terrifying. Gogol evidently intended to develop the theme of the ‘deeply’ formative impact of

42 “Одно только меня смущает, это характер Лизы. … У ней … нет … никаких признаков сильных чувств. … Сделайте милость, … не воспитывайте таким образом Олю, как воспиталась Лиза. … Знаете ли вы, как важны впечатления детских лет? то, что в детстве только хорошая привычка и наклонность, превратится в зрелых летах в добродетель. Внушите ей правила религии. Это фундамент всего. Если бы над Лизой имела власть религия, тогда с нею бы всё можно было сделать. … Нужно сильно потрясти детские чувства, и тогда они надолго сохранят всё прекрасное. Я испытал это на себе. … Я помню: я ничего сильно не чувствовал. … Но один раз—я живо, как теперь, помню этот случай. Я просил вас рассказать мне о страшном суде, и вы мне ребенку так хорошо, так понятно, так трогательно рассказали о тех благах, которые ожидают людей за добродетельную жизнь, и так разительно, так страшно описали вечные муки грешных, что это потрясло и разбудило во мне всю чувствительность. Это заронило и произвело впоследствии во мне самые высокие мысли” (X, 280–282). 43 See below, pp. 20 and 231.

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education in the second part of his novel,44 but in the first part it already plays an important role. And in this context it was axiomatic for him that the “good habits and inclinations of the child” would necessarily and almost irrevocably crystallize into “virtue.” The converse of this proposition leads directly to Gogol’s theory of evil. However, before we embark full-scale on evil, it would be appropriate to point out yet another aspect of the letter quoted above: the singularly fluid boundary it suggests between ethics and aesthetics. This is apparent, for example, in the statement that a child’s feelings “must be violently shaken” for it to “long retain all that is of beauty,” or that the depiction of the Last Judgment went so “deep … that it later bore fruit within me in the noblest of thoughts.” Gogol speaks of education in “beauty” and “nobility” of sentiment when what he really means is moral “goodness.” We shall see that this is no coincidence.

2.  Gogol’s Theory of Evil45 The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind46 Rarely has an author attached such lofty ambitions to his work as Gogol to Dead Souls: as his models he cited no lesser authorities than Homer and Dante.47 For 44 For instance in the career of Tentetnikov in Part Two, Chapter One of Dead Souls (on this point see also Mikhail Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia. Morfologiia. Ideologiia. Kontekst [Moscow: Radiks, 1993], 467f.). In light of Gogol’s etiology of evil it may be noted how many leading figures of Christian pedagogy, from Comenius, through Francke to Pestalozzi and Fröbel, saw the lie as the root of human evil (see Wilhelm Nolte, “Die Bewertung der Lüge in der theoretischen Pädagogik” [The evaluation of the lie in pedagogical theory], in Otto Lipmann, and Paul Plaut, eds. Die Lüge in psychologischer, philosophischer, juristischer, pädagogischer, historischer, soziologischer, sprach- und literaturwissenschaftlicher und entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Betrachtung [Leipzig: Barth, 1927], 187–211). 45 This and the following chapter represent a shortened version of a paper given by the author at a conference on “Russian Conceptual History in the Modern Era” in Bamberg in September 2001 (see Urs Heftrich, “Der Dämon im Alltagskleid: Zum Begriff der ‘pošlost’ bei Nikolaj Gogol’ , ” in Russische Begriffsgeschichte der Neuzeit, ed. Peter Thiergen (Cologne, Vienna, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2006), 127–137. 46 Hannah Arendt, Vom Leben des Geistes (Munich and Zürich: Piper, 1989), vol. 1, 179. 47 The influence of Homer on Gogol has been most extensively examined in Carl R. Proffer, The Simile and Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967); see also Gerhard Giesemann, “Homer-Reminiszenzen in den ‘Mertvye duši,’” Ost und West 2 (1977): 205–221; and more recently Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

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him, the author of the Odyssey was “driven by the inner desire” to bequeath to the people of his age a “complete and vital code of laws,”48 and in the same way he intended in his own epic to present Russian society with a picture of its faults, to be followed by precise instructions for their eradication.49 We shall return to Homer in the second part of this study; as for Dante, the importance of the Divina Commedia for Dead Souls has already been briefly touched upon: Gogol’s hero, too, was to pass from “hell”—the first part of the planned trilogy—through “purgatory” into “paradise.” But for Gogol this was not enough—he sought to share personally in his protagonist’s cathartic journey. Hence Dead Souls aspires to be nothing less than a therapy for evil as it appeared both in the Russia of his day and in the author himself. In both dimensions, Gogol’s perception of evil is again transfused with a compound of depression and grandiosity, an interplay that understandably led his contemporaries to doubt the author’s honesty. But of the honesty with which he experienced his own state of spiritual abjectness there can be no doubt. The other side of the coin, however, was that all Russia should share in his own hoped-for healing. Such hubris borders on madness. Nevertheless, it has method, and the method is worth investigating—all the more so since it bears centrally on the understanding of Gogol’s novel. For Gogol had developed a fully-fledged theory of evil, including its cure, and this model sheds considerable light on both the novel and its author’s psychological condition. Hannah Arendt, who in 1963 spoke of “the banality of evil,” observed of our traditional concept that it was of “something demonic, its incarnation is Satan, a ‘lightning fall from heaven’ (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer the fallen angel (‘the devil is an angel, too—­Unamuno), whose sin is pride … that superbia of which only the best are capable, who don’t want to serve God but to be as God.”50 Dostoevsky, too, had spoken of evil’s traditional 1994), 296–301. On Gogol and Dante see Elena A. Smirnova, “O mnogomyslennosti ‘Mertvykh dush,’” in Kontekst 1982 (Moscow: n.p., 1983), 164–191; idem, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi” (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 126–134; Marianne Shapiro, “Gogol and Dante,” ­Modern Language Studies 17, no. 2 (1987): 37–54; and Wilfried Potthoff, Dante in Rußland. Zur ­Italienrezeption der russischen Literatur von der Romantik bis zum Symbolismus (Heidelberg: ­Winter, 1991), 109–113. 48 “всякая малейшая черта в ‘Одиссее’ говорит о внутреннем желании поэта всех поэтов оставить древнему человеку живую и полную книгу законодательства” (VIII, 240). 49 See, for example, Gogol’s statement on Dead Souls: “Нет, бывает время, когда нельзя иначе устремить общество или даже всё поколенье к прекрасному, пока не покажешь всю глубину его настоящей мерзости; бывает время, что даже вовсе не следует говорить о высоком и прекрасном, не показавши тут же ясно, как день, путей и дорог к нему для всякого. Последнее обстоятельство было мало и слабо развито во втором томе Мертвых душ, а оно должно было быть едва ли не главное; а потому он сожжен” (VIII, 298). 50 Arendt, Vom Leben des Geistes, vol. 1, 13–15.

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appearance “in flaming red with scorched wings, ‘accompanied by thunder and lightning.’”51 It is to this demonic mythological-literary evil that Arendt contrasts her own experience with an undemonic but far more real and more evil evil: that abhorrent “banality of evil before which words fail”: Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (­Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because “The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago’s: “I hate the Moor, my cause is hearted”; Claggart’s hatred for Billy Budd’s “barbarian” innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a “depravity according to nature”), or by covetousness, the “root of all evil” (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas). However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer … was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.52 Only one title seems to be missing from Hannah Arendt’s list of classics: Gogol’s Dead Souls. For long before Arendt’s insight into the “banality of evil” Gogol had developed in a masterly fashion the subject of evil as permeating the supposed trivia of everyday.53 That he had earlier—for example in his story “The Portrait”—added a few brushstrokes of his own to the image of the Romantic demon is no longer much to the point; for personified evil, proud and sublime, fascinated him less as time passed, yielding to an interest in the inconspicuous manifestations that he considered far more dangerous. How well Pushkin 51 Thus speaks Dostoevsky’s devil in The Brothers Karamazov: “[В] красном сиянии, ‘гремя и блистая’, с опаленными крыльями,” mocking the Romantic aura—and thereby entering a plea for the triviality—of evil (Fedor M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [­Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990], vol. 15, 81). On the banality of evil in Dostoevsky see, for example, ­Richard W. F. Pope, “Peter Verkhovensky and the Banality of Evil,” in Dostoevsky and the ­Twentieth Century, ed. Malcolm V. Jones (Nottingham: Astra Press, 1993), 39–47; and Heftrich, “Der Dämon im Alltagskleid.” 52 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen (Munich: Piper, 1964), 300; see also Arendt, Vom Leben des Geistes, vol. 1, 13–14. 53 See the quotation from Walter Rehm in the Foreword to this study.

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understood his colleague’s strengths in this field is evident from the well-known observation that No previous writer has had such a talent for depicting the banality [poshlost′] of life so clearly, for presenting with such force the banality of the banal man [poshlost′ poshlogo cheloveka], so that all those small aspects that generally escape the eye impinge upon it as of great importance.54 Poshlost′ poshogo cheloveka—that is the decisive formula. The word poshlyi (from po‑idti) means in its root form “customary,” “longstanding,” “legitimated by tradition.” Whatever was so legitimated was thought of (especially in religious contexts) as good; what broke with tradition, whatever was newfangled, was bad. This scale of values was inverted by the sudden invocation of the new, by virtue of the highest authority, as good. A specific historical sequence of events, the Petrine Reforms,55 turned the positive quality of poshlost′ into a negative, and ever since that time poshlyi has come to stand for the trivial and banal, the flat and hackneyed, the commonplace, mediocre, threadbare, and unoriginal.56 The strong moral slant of Gogol’s own usage brings the word close to what Hannah Arendt meant by the “banality of evil.” In fact, since Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s essay on Gogol and the Devil from 1906 so much has been written on the subject of poshlost′ in Gogol that it would seem decidedly hackneyed and unoriginal—in short poshlo—to add yet another nuance to the picture.57 It might be more interesting, instead, to see poshlost′ in relation to another, less frequent, item in Gogol’s lexicon: nechuvstvitel′nost′, a word denoting the “unwitting,” the “unconscious,” the “unnoticeable” (in the latter 54 “[Е]ще ни у одного писателя не было этого дара выставлять так ярко пошлость жизни, уметь очертить в такой силе пошлость пошлого человека, чтобы вся та ме­лочь, которая ускользает от глаз, мелькнула бы крупно в глаза всем” (VIII, 292). 55 See Viktor V. Vinogradov, Istoriia slov (Moscow: Tolk, 1994), 531–533; Iu. S. Sorokin, Razvitie slovarnogo sostava russkogo literaturnogo iazyka. 30–90e gody XIX veka (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1965), 329–330. 56 See Jörg Lehmann, “Gogol’s ‘Poshlye dushi,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 39 (1997): 58‑59. 57 On poshlost′ in Gogol see (in chronological order) Dimitrij Mereschkowskij, Gogol und der Teufel, trans. Alexander Eliasberg (Hamburg and Munich: Ellermann, 1963); Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Direct Publishing, 1944); V. Zen′kovskii, N. V. Gogol′ (Paris: YMCA Press, 1961); Christian von Tschilschke, Epen des Trivialen. N. V. Gogols “Die toten Seelen” und G. Flauberts “Bouvard und Pécuchet”. Ein struktureller und thematischer Ver­gleich (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996); Lehmann, “Gogol’s ‘Poshlye dushi”; Aage A. Hansen‑Löve, “‘Gøgøl’’—Zur Poetik der Null- und Leerstelle,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 39 (1997): 226–229; Heftrich, “Der Dämon im Alltagskleid.”

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sense, the adjective nechuvstvitel′nyi is now obsolete, but not so in Gogol’s days). Statistically the word does not occur that often, but, when it does, it is in close companionship with poshlost′. The relation is worth investigating more closely. In his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends Gogol sums up the impact of his novel and the intention behind it: Dead Souls did not cause such a stir in Russia … because of its images of triumphant evil and suffering innocence. Not at all. My characters are no criminals. … What disturbed my readers was the meanness [poshlost′] of everything. It shocked them that one character was meaner [poshlee] than the last. … They would have more easily forgiven me if I had presented them with picturesque monsters; what they did not forgive me was that commonness [poshlost′]. … The longstanding plan for Dead Souls needed these nobodies precisely for the first part. But these nobodies are by no means portraits of insignificant people; on the contrary, they gather together many features of those who think themselves better than others. … From all the fine people I know I had to extract the mean [poshloe] and repugnant elements they had unintentionally [nechaianno] assimilated and return it to its lawful owners. Do not ask why the first part must consist so thoroughly of meanness [poshlost′] and its figures without exception be so mean [poshlyi]: the other volumes will provide you with the answer—let that suffice!58 Dead Souls (at least in its first part) is, then, incontrovertibly about poshlost′— the undemonic evil that men and women assimilate “unintentionally,” as if by the way. How this happens, how “fine people” gradually succumb to evil habits

58 “Мертвые души не потому так испугали Россию … чтобы представили потрясающие картины торжествующего зла и страждущей невинности. Ничуть не бывало. Герои мои вовсе не злодеи. … Но пошлость всего вместе испугала читателей. Испугало их то, что один за другим следуют у меня герои один пошлее другого. … Мне бы скорей простили, если бы я выставил картинных извергов; но пошлости не простили мне. … Вследствие уже давно принятого плана Мертвых душ для первой части поэмы требовались именно люди ничтожные. Эти ничтожные люди, однако ж, ничуть не портреты с ничтожных людей; напротив, в них собраны черты от тех, которые считают себя лучшими других. … Мне потребно было отобрать от всех прекрасных людей, которых я знал, всё пошлое и гадкое, что они захватили нечаянно, и возвратить законным их владельцам. Не спрашивай, зачем первая часть должна быть вся—пошлость и зачем в ней лица до единого должны быть пошлы: на это дадут тебе ответ другие томы,—вот и всё!” (VIII, 293–295).

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and dispositions is something Gogol developed into a fully fledged theory in his Correspondence with Friends—and, for the reader who is not already disconcerted by that book’s reactionary message, the theory may well be worth some attention. For if one looks beyond the external appearances of evil, which Gogol catalogues with patristic rigor, into the inner mechanism of the deeds whose evil he analyzes, one is immediately struck by the strength of his faith in humanity. Thus he protests vigorously against the common conservative lament at what is taken to be inexorable moral decline: Many … are convinced that … evil has put down such deep roots that it is inconceivable to eradicate it. That is unjust. People today sin incomparably more than they ever did, but they sin not from any overwhelming inner vice, nor from lack of feeling or from the desire to sin, but because they simply do not see their sins. The appalling truth of the present age has not yet fully come to light: that today all without exception sin, not immediately, but indirectly. … Lift the veil, however, and show people only a small part of the fearful things they do, not directly but indirectly, and they will speak differently. … Half the sins of humankind stem not from corruption but from ignorance.59 This sounds at first like a Socratic doctrine of enlightenment as the universal means to human improvement. But Gogol is no enlightener; his Correspondence contains many passages attacking belief in the power of pure reason,60 and his hostility to the scientific achievements of the 19th century—especially in the field of economics—was implacable: One need lift only a corner of the veil and show but one of the misdeeds that are committed every minute … and people will under59 “[М]ногие … почти уверились, что … зло пустило так глубоко свои корни, что нельзя уже и думать об его искоренение. Это несправедливо. Грешит нынешний человек, точно, несравненно больше, нежели когда‑либо прежде, но грешит не от преизобилья своего собственного разврата, не от бесчувственности и не оттого, чтобы хотел грешить, но оттого, что не видит грехов своих. Еще не ясно и не совсем открылась страшная истина нынешного века, что теперь все грешат до единого, но грешат не прямо, а косвенно. … Но если поднять перед ним завесу и показать ему хотя часть тех ужасов, которые он производит косвенно, а не прямо, тогда он заговорит другое. … [П]оловина грехов его— от неведенья, а не от разврата” (VIII, 305–307). 60 Elsewhere he spoke of the “haughty rationality” of the nineteenth century literally as “the devil” (“диавол”; VIII, 415).

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stand of their own accord that to devastate half a village or district in order that the carpenter Gambs may make a living is a proposition that can only issue from the empty head of a nineteenthcentury economist, not from the sound reasoning of a thinking person. And what if you note the chain of all those indirect crimes committed … unthinkingly and make plain to your fellows the whole danger of the present day, in which each one is able at a single stroke to effect the corruption of many souls!61 At this point Gogol’s analysis of a specifically modern form of guilt becomes astonishingly clear-sighted: he describes in detail how the effects of human action are inevitably obscured by delegation of responsibility, and he draws the moral consequences. What he calls “indirect crimes” derive unmistakably from a modern division of labor—a phenomenon whose ultimate and most horrendous excess occasioned Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the banality of evil. The mechanism of indirect guilt also entails the dominance of public opinion over individual moral judgment. Here, too, a distinction must be made: Gogol’s antipathy toward the journalism of his day is profoundly anti-Enlightenment, but at the same time it sensitized him to an eminently modern danger. Moral responsibility for one’s actions cannot be delegated: whether for better or worse, we can only ever act from first hand. But what does this mean, when our horizon of knowledge is manifestly second-hand? Gogol’s critique of the media is excoriating: Benighted men, known to nobody, who possess neither thoughts nor heartfelt convictions, rule over the minds and opinions of sensible people; and the ragged pages of the newspaper, of whose mendacity all are aware, become the unwitting lawgiver of those who in reality scorn that product.62 61 “Только слегка приподыми … завесу и укажи ему [= человеку] хотя одно из тех ежеминутных преступлений, которые он совершает. … Он и сам тогда смекнет, что разорить полдеревни или пол‑уезда затем, чтобы доставить хлеб столяру Гамбсу, есть вывод, который мог образоваться только в пустой голове эконома XIX века, а не в здоровой голове умного человека. А что же, если [проповедник] поднимет всю цепь того множества косвенных преступлений, которые совершает человек своею неосмотрительностью, гордостью и самоуверенностью в себе и покажет всю опасность нынешнего времени, среди которого всяк может погубить разом несколько душ” (VIII, 307). 62 “Люди темные, никому неизвестные, не имеющие мыслей и чистосердечных убеждений, правят мненьями и мыслями умных людей, и газетный листок, признаваемый лживым всеми, становится нечувствительным законодателем его не уважающего человека” (VIII, 415; emphasis U.H.).

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Again evil takes possession of us “unwittingly,” “indiscernibly”: although naturally good, we succumb to it from a no less natural sluggishness. As if in sleep, we are unconsciously gripped by a current that draws us remorselessly from our proper course. This is the sense of a passage in the Correspondence that bears directly on the ethical intention of Dead Souls: Call out … to your beautiful but sleeping fellows! Throw a plank from the shore and shout at the top of your voice that they should save their poor souls. They are already so far from the riverbank, and the worthless surface of the world is drawing them ever farther away: the dinner parties, the legs of the dancing girls, the daily torpor of drunkenness—unwittingly they surround themselves with flesh and are soon themselves nothing but flesh with scarcely a trace of soul. … Oh could you but tell them what my Pliushkin will say when I reach the third volume of Dead Souls!63 A note on the novel left in Gogol’s estate connects the theme of unwittingness directly with poshlost′. There he speaks of Chichikov as one who, in a way that is scarcely noticeable, is gripped unwittingly [nechuvstvitel′no] by the common [poshlye] habits of the world, the rules and circumstances of polite, pointless society which in the end so inveigle and bind the entire man that nothing remains of him but a heap of worldly conditionings and conventions.64 The emphasis placed in this comment on the social dimension of poshlost′ refers clearly (albeit implicitly) to the word’s etymological roots in habits and conventions. But there is a paradox here, for Gogol uses the word in its pejorative modern (i.e. post-Petrine) sense, whereas the whole burden of his Correspondence is to restore the old Russian order. 63 “Воззови … к прекрасному, но дремлющему человеку. Брось ему с берега доску и закричи во весь голос, чтобы спасал свою бедную душу: уже он далеко от берега, уже несет и несет его ничтожная верхушка света, несут обеды, ноги плясавиц, ежедневное сонное опьяненье; нечувствительно облекается он плотью и стал уже весь плоть, и уже почти нет в нем души … О, если б ты мог сказать ему то, что должен сказать мой Плюшкин, если доберусь до третьего тома ‘Мертв душ’!” (VIII, 280) 64 “нечувствительно обхватывают совсем почти незаметно пошлые привычки света, условия, приличия без дела движущегося общества, которые до того, наконец, все опутают и облекут человека, что и не останется в нем его самого, а куча только одних принадлежащих свету условий и привычек” (VI, 691).

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3.  Gogol’s Therapeutic Model against Evil I consist entirely of future; in the present I am nothing. Gogol to A. O. Rosset65

According to Gogol, evil follows a strategy of unconscious habituation: the demon that would thoroughly alarm us if it appeared “in flaming red with scorched wings, ‘accompanied by thunder and lightning,’” dons the everyday apparel of poshlost′ in order to outwit our ethical defenses. The therapeutic plan Gogol develops from this diagnosis is to turn the enemy’s weapons against it. As unwittingly as we stumble into vicious ways, so we are to be led unwittingly back onto the path of virtue: “In a word, how can one set this all back in place? In Europe that is impossible: [Europe] is awash with blood and futile combat, achieving nothing. In Russia it is possible: in Russia this can take place unnoticeably, without any novelties, revolutions, or reforms. …”66 The Slavophile roots of this program, themselves indebted to the Romantic rejection of the French Revolution, are unmistakable: organic, continuous growth versus bloody revolution, gradual change from within versus impetuous activism from without. Before the Romantics came to such conclusions, however, Friedrich Schiller had outlined his project for the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller, it is well known, made a permanent impression on Gogol, who at the tender age of eighteen had invested a full forty rubles in his writings67 and who mentioned him later in key passages not only of Nevsky Prospekt68 but also of Dead 65 The Russian text of the letter of November 20, 1847 reads: “я весь состою из будущего, на настоящем же есмь нуль” (XIII, 394). 66 “Словом, как возвратить все на свое место? В Европе сделать этого невозможно: она обольется кровью, изнеможет в напрасных бореньях и ничего не успеет. В России есть возможность; в России может это нечувствительно совершиться—не какими‑нибудь нововведениями, переворотами и реформами” (VIII, 364; emphasis U.H.). 67 See Gogol’s letter to his mother, April 6, 1827 (X, 91). Gogol’s fellow student Prokopovich relates that the enthusiasm for Schiller did not last long (X, 408); nevertheless, Schiller’s impact on Gogol’s intellectual world and on his work was manifestly considerable. 68 In Nevsky Prospekt, both protagonists, the aesthete Piskarev and the bon vivant Pirogov, are measured against Schiller. Piskarev’s downfall lies in his euphoric confusion of aesthetic and logical appearances: the very temptation “to attribute real existence to the ideal” against which Schiller—taking female beauty as his example—explicitly warns in letter 26 on aesthetic education. Upon Pirogov’s appearance in the house of the German craftsman Schiller, the narrator notes that this Schiller is neither the author of Wilhelm Tell nor of the History of the Thirty Years’ War (III, 37). A closer reading suggests that—rather than confining himself, as Eikhenbaum thought, to a mere pun—Gogol allows here for a third Schiller, namely the author of the philosophical writings on aesthetics; for it is this Schiller whom his colleague Hoffmann leads by the nose. At the end of Nevsky Prospekt, the Schillerian distinction between true and false

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Souls.69 Like Schiller, Gogol believed in the possibility of aesthetic education for humankind—an education whose advantage, compared with direct preaching, lay, he thought, in its discreet “subcutaneous” workings. The following comment is strongly reminiscent of Schiller’s observations on “the stage as a moral institution,” albeit with a specifically Gogolesque slant in its explicit reference to the unconscious moral impact of the theater: “The theater is … a pulpit from which to preach goodness. … The frequent repetition of works of high dramatic art … in which attention is concentrated on human nature and the soul, will of necessity … strengthen society and unconsciously reinforce its characters. …”70 The effect of this aesthetics of the indirect and subliminal depends in Gogol’s estimation on the artist’s success in assimilating and transforming the trivial realities of the audience’s everyday life. Skilled narrative mimicry can, in defiance of all social conditioning, so insinuate a writer’s message into the reader’s conscience as to bring about a moral transformation: The Russian reader must really feel that the figures presented [in the book] are taken from the same flesh and blood that he is made of. … Only then will he melt into the being of his hero and unwittingly assimilate those influences that you will never infuse into him through preaching and sober reasoning. Such complete embodiment, such perfect roundness of character only ever succeeded for me when I was able to grasp in my spirit the essence of life’s prosaic squabbling.71 The “essence of life’s prosaic squabbling”—what else could this be but a modality of poshlost′?

appearances increasingly tips in the direction of the universal falsehood of appearances in the form of the lie, a baroque sense of vanitas mundi manifestly gaining the upper hand over the aesthetic optimism of the classical period. 69 In Dead Souls Schiller’s name appears at the precise moment when Chichikov starts his return journey to the town after completing his purchases of souls from the landowners (VI, 131). 70 “Театр … [э]то такая кафедра, с которой можно много сказать миру добра. … Частое повторение высоко драматических сочинений, … где обращено вниманье на природу и душу человека, станет необходимо укреплять общество …, заставит нечувствительно характеры более устоиваться в самих себе” (VIII, 268‑269; emphasis U.H.). 71 “Нужно, чтобы русский читатель действительно почувствовал, что выведенное лицо взято именно из того самого тела, из которого создан и он сам. … Тогда только сливается он сам с своим героем и нечувствительно принимает от него те внушения, которых никаким рассужденьем и никакою проповедью не внушишь. Это полное воплощенье в плоть, это полное округленье характера совершалось у меня только тогда, когда я заберу в уме своем весь этот прозаический существенный дрязг жизни” (VIII, 453; emphasis U.H.).

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Why the first part of Dead Souls must consist entirely of poshlost′—this question, posed by the author himself, can now be answered. Gogol intended his work to initiate a program of aesthetic re-education of those whom he judged universally infected by evil in its banal forms—in other words, by poshlost′. Already in Chapter Two of the novel we find a rejection of demonism in terms that anticipate Hannah Arendt—including her thesis that in the presence of this very opposite of the demonic “words fail”: It is considerably easier to depict characters on a grand scale: there you just dash the pigments onto the canvas with a full sweep— black, blazing orbs, beetling eyebrows, a forehead furrowed with a deep crease, a black cape (or one as scarlet as fire) tossed over the shoulders—and your portrait is done; but you take all these gentlemen now, of whom there are so many in this world, who are so very much like one another in appearance …—why, these gentlemen are dreadfully difficult to do in portraits.72 Gogol’s plan in Dead Souls was to chronicle his hero Chichikov’s adsorption into “poshlust′”73 as the result of an unwitting education in evil habits that was to stand as the prelude to his gradual reconditioning into better ways. It is in this sense that Dead Souls, even in its truncated first part, can be seen as an inchoate entwicklungsroman—a thesis which the present study will confirm in detail. A glance at a single incident in Chichikov’s journey may illustrate the general tenor of the argument. On his course through provincial Russia Chichikov is cast by chance into the arms of a sixteen-year-old governor’s daughter, his Beatrice, destined (given the work in its completed form) to redeem him from evil. The description of the young girl emphasizes her innocence: she is manifestly untouched as yet by any corrupting influence—indeed is so to such an extent that she lacks all individuality. She is what Hansen-Löve has called “an empty zero”74: “The pretty little oval of her face was as rounded out as a small newly laid egg and, like an egg, exhibited a certain 72 “Гораздо легче изображать характеры большого размера: там просто бросай краски со всей руки на полотно, черные палящие глаза, нависшие брови, перерезанный морщиною лоб, перекинутый через плечо черный или алый, как огонь, плащ,—и портрет готов; но вот эти все господа, которых много на свете, которые с вида очень похожи между собою … —эти господа страшно трудны для портретов” (VI, 23–24). 73 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 68. 74 Hansen‑Löve, “‘Gøgøl’’—Zur Poetik der Null- und Leerstelle,” 218, points up the proximity of this oval to a zero, but does not in this context comment on Schiller’s principles of aesthetic education.

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translucent whiteness. …”75 Chichikov wonders animatedly “… what, chiefly, is so good about her?” and comes to the conclusion “One can fashion anything out of her; she can be a miracle, and she may turn out to be so much trash … !”76 Schiller’s reflections on “the aesthetic condition” make an interesting comparison: The condition of the human spirit before all determination … is that of unlimited definability. … One could call this absence of determination an empty infinity—which is by no means to be confused with an infinite void. … If, then, the … absence or lack of determination is conceived as an empty infinity, it follows that the aesthetic freedom of determination that is its counterpart in reality must be thought of as a fulfilled infinity. … Hence, in the aesthetic condition, the human being is a zero. …77 For Gogol the function of art is to reinstate the originally unmarked, but later inevitably spoiled, tablet of the human spirit into the aesthetic condition of “unlimited definability” in which it will once again be receptive to good. And the artist’s task—to borrow Chichikov’s terms—is to return imperceptibly to zero what has turned in the meantime to trash, in the hope that the miracle may occur.

75 “Хорошенький овал лица ее круглился, как свеженькое яичко” (VI, 90). 76 “Но ведь что, главное, в ней хорошо? … Из нее всё можно сделать, она может быть чудо, а может выйти и дрянь … !” (VI, 93) 77 Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eduard von der Hellen (Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta, 1904–1905), vol. 12, 70 and 80 (Letters 19 and 21).

CHAPTER 1

Ethos and Epic

1.  The Author Reviews His Work1 But what if the key was lying right next to the casket? Gogol, Razviazka “Revizora”2

In the Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends Gogol generally speaks rather disparagingly of his novel, as of something raw and incomplete that still had to earn its credentials. Belinsky quickly drew the conclusion that Gogol simply “disowned” his masterpiece—as he had all his “truly great works.”3 But this opinion, however widely circulated, was completely wrong. What Gogol meant with Dead Souls was something the father of socialist literary criticism could not be expected to endorse, and in its place Belinsky’s interpretation of the novel as a satire on Russian serfdom has fallen on ready ears4—so much so that “in the civic

1 The core theses of this chapter were first presented in outline in Urs Heftrich, “Rätselhafter Zwerg. 150 Jahre nach Nikolai Gogols ‘Briefwechsel mit Freunden,’” Literatur und Kunst. Neue Zürcher Zeitung 218, no. 266 (1997): 53–54; the chapter in its present form was originally printed as idem, “Čičikovs Reise zu sich selbst: Versuch einer Deutung von Nikolaj Gogol’s Toten Seelen,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görres Gesellschaft, new series 42 (2001): 175–224. 2 “Ну, а если и ключ лежит тут же возле шкатулки?” (IV, 129). 3 “Вы имели несчастие с гордым смирением отречься от Ваших истинно великих произведений” (VIII, 510). 4 On Gogol and Belinsky see Richard Freeborn, The Rise of the Russian Novel. Studies in the Russian Novel from “Eugene Onegin” to “War and Peace” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 75–87; on Belinsky’s longlasting impact on the perception of Gogol see also Hans Rothe, Die Schlucht. Ivan Gontscharov und der “Realismus” nach Turgenev und vor Dostojevskij (1849–1869) (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1991), 140. Belinsky’s inability to do justice to Dead Souls is not surprising, given his general lack of understanding for anything allegorical in tendency like the Divina Commedia or Faust II (see Dmitrij Tschižewskij, “Hegel in Rußland,” in Hegel bei den Slaven, ed. Dmitrij Tschižewskij, 2nd ext. ed. [Darmstadt: ­Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961], 207).

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reader’s mind,” as Nabokov wickedly remarked, “Dead Souls was gently turning into Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”5 Gogol himself emphatically rejected this reading, not only insisting in 1845 against Aleksandra Smirnova that Dead Souls was about neither the provincial government nor the repugnant landowners,6 but already in a letter of 1843 to Shevyrev denying unequivocally that there was anything satirical about his novel—although one admittedly had to read it several times to grasp that point. Given the length of time he had spent on his book, Gogol felt, however, that he could demand this of his readers.7 His complaint in Correspondence that his critics had “little experience in thinking themselves into the composition of a work”8 would seem in this light to reflect his reception by Belinsky. “All my most recent works,” Gogol’s Correspondence affirms, “are the story of my own soul”—nothing more, nothing less.9 As such they “are only interesting from a psychological point of view.”10 The pattern Gogol claimed for the composition of Dead Souls seems simple to the point of naïvety: “It was done like this: I took one of my bad qualities … and sought to imagine it in the form of a mortal enemy. … I’ve shed a great deal of ugly qualities by dressing my heroes in them.”11 That sounds as if writing was an attempted therapy against innate evil. What could possibly come of it? At best bad literature or—which would be a great deal worse—the delusion of salvation.   5 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 115–116.   6 “Вовсе не губерния и не несколько уродливых помещиков, и не то, что им приписывают, есть предмет ‘Мертвых душ’” (XII, 504).   7 Gogol wrote on February 28, 1843 to Shevyrev: “Разве ты не видишь, что еще и до сих пор все принимают мою книгу за сатиру и личность, тогда как в ней нет и тени сатиры и личности, что можно заметить вполне только после нескольких чтений; … книга писана долго; нужно, чтоб дали труд всмотреться в нее долго” (XII, 144). See Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 165.   8 Gogol himself considered one of the obstacles to a genuinely aesthetic critique of Dead Souls to lie in the “непривычка всматриваться в постройку сочинения” (VIII, 288). He admitted to Sergei Aksakov in August 1842 that many of the allusions in Part One would only clarify against the background of the (planned) third part of the novel (“полное значение лирических намеков может изъясниться только тогда, когда выйдет последняя часть”; XII, 93). This might explain why so few of Gogol’s contemporaries grasped the structural rigor of the work. Today, when we have access to all Gogol’s observations on this issue, the task is to reconstruct and reflect his edifice as fully as possible.   9 “все мои последние сочинения—история моей собственной души” (VIII, 292). 10 The “Letter on the Sovremennik” to Pletnev runs: “Всё мною написанное замечатель­но только в психологическом значении” (VIII, 427), and further: “I can at present speak of nothing else than what is close to my own soul” (“Я даже не могу заговорить теперь ни о чем, кроме того, что близко моей собственной душе”). 11 “Вот как это делалось: взявши дурное свойство мое, я преследовал его в другом званьи и на другом поприще, старался себе изобразить его в виде смертельного врага. … Я уже от многих своих гадостей избавился тем, что предал их своим героям, обсмеял их в них и заставил других также над ними посмеяться” (VIII, 294 and 296f.).

Ethos and Epic

Gogol’s idée fixe that he must become a better man in order to write the second part of Dead Souls is undoubtedly one of the reasons why he never finished it. But one might wonder if the converse is not also true: that the real driving force behind the artistic completion of the first part of the intended trilogy was not that very need for purification of the soul. In his late work the “mysterious dwarf ” was by no means as blind as Belinsky and his successors would have us believe. Hidden among the pages of abstruse epistolary edification in his Correspondence is, in fact, nothing less than the key to Dead Souls. It will pay to briefly recall the plot of the novel.

2.  The System of the Five Landowners “Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov,” we learn at the beginning of the book that the censors renamed “Chichikov’s Adventures,” is “traveling on private affairs.”12 What those affairs are is only revealed in the final chapter. Chichikov, a customs officer dismissed for smuggling in an extravagant style, exploits a legal gap by nominally buying up recently deceased serfs, for whom their masters must still pay taxes, and using them qua living—for, as taxable, they are still nominally alive—as ­security for the purchase of land. In pursuit of this end he sets out for the town of N–, where he embarks on negotiations with five different landowners: the sentimentalist Manilov, the superstitious Korobochka, the gambler Nozdrev, the shark Sobakevich, and the old miser Pliushkin. But Nozdrev and Korobochka make the bizarre dealings public and Chichikov has to leave town in a hurry. Whereupon the narrator delays his character’s flight with an impromptu biographical sketch, a move that may well irritate the reader who wants only to reach the end of the story—and the reader has the sympathy of at least one modern critic who judges the excursus relatively uninteresting, indeed “banal.”13 That judgment, however, will surely prove overly hasty, for it is precisely here that the track starts that takes us to the center of Gogol’s work. 12 “Павел Иванович Чичиков, помещик, по своим надобностям” (VI, 10). 13 Gary Saul Morson comments: “We learn who Chichikov is and why he wants dead souls. To be sure, this explanation is rather banal and much less interesting than the sprawling mountain of nonsense Gogol piles upon it” (Gary Saul Morson, “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics,” in Essays on Gogol. Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fussoand Priscilla Meyer [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992], 200–239, here 226). Robert A. Maguire dedicates a complete section of his Gogol study to the final chapter of Dead Souls, but only a single sentence to Chichikov’s biography, which quantitatively constitutes more than half of it (Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994], 242–254, here 243).

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Of all the answers given to the question as to what lies behind the portraits of the five landowners, that of the Symbolist Andrei Bely has gained most attention. Bely saw Chichikov’s partners in his dealing for dead souls as inhabiting five circles of hell, graded according to the level of spiritual deadness they each represent: “The visits to the landowners are stages in a descent into grime, the estates themselves circles of a Dantesque hell of which each master or mistress is more intensely dead than their predecessor.”14 Horst‑Jürgen Gerigk had the idea of transferring Bely’s notion of proximity to death from an other-worldly to a this-worldly dimension: “Without realizing it, Chichikov is here visiting the border-posts of human life, journeying from youth through age. … Gogol is obviously developing a theory of life’s different phases.”15 But this is clearly incompatible with the age of Korobochka: Gogol consistently calls her an old woman (starukha),16 whereas by Gerigk’s reckoning she should be quite young. Donald Fanger, in turn, simply inverts Bely’s reading: “The landowners Chichikov visits do not, as Biely claims, represent a progressively greater degree of deadness; the individuating moral principle in each is equally absent. What they rather represent are differing degrees (and kinds) of aliveness—an aliveness that reaches its apogee in Sobakevich and Nozdryov. …”17 Mikhail Vaiskopf suggests a somewhat different system for the five landowners: they represent for him five levels in the Gnostic descent of Sophia, the fallen Goddess of Wisdom—levels correlative with the Four Elements and the Ether, which can in turn be related to the Five Temperaments.18 Vaiskopf, 14 “Посещение помещиков—стадии падения в грязь; поместья—круги дантова ада; владетель каждого—более мертв, чем предыдущий” (Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, ed. D. Chizhevskii [Munich: Fink, 1969], 103). 15 Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, “Nikolaj Gogol: Die toten Seelen,” in Der russische Roman, ed. Bodo Zelinsky (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1979], 93. 16 The dialogue of the two ladies in Chapter Nine is explicit on this matter: “’Да что Коробочка? разве молода и хороша собою?’—‘Ничуть, старуха’” (VI, 183). Barbara Heldt counts eleven occasions on which Korobochka is referred to as starukha (Barbara Heldt, “‘Dead Souls’: Without Naming Names,” in Nikolay Gogol. Text and Context, ed. Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell [London: Macmillan, 1989], 87). Simon Karlinsky characterizes her as a “familiar Gogolian figure of a meddlesome and dimwitted old woman” (Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 233). In a pre-stage of Dead Souls Gogol gives her age as around sixty (“около 60 лет”; VI, 616). 17 Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 180f. 18 See Mikhail Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia. Morfologiia. Ideologiia. Kontekst (Moscow: Radiks, 1993), 382–386, who in turn follows Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1992), 187–188. In the speculative thought of the Valentinians, Sophia, the fallen principle of Divine Wisdom, passes through five stages of suffering in her quest for heavenly illumination: grief, fear, b­ ewilderment

Ethos and Epic

does not, however, develop this scheme and it remains an outline of which he himself comments that it would be “naïve” to set Gogol’s characters conclusively within it.19 Russell Scott Valentino, for his part, suggests a much worldlier—and in its consistency very intriguing—explanation for “the landowners’ sequence in Dead Souls.”20 For him, Gogol’s epic is a “politically conservative reaction to a perceived loss of social value as the result of the rise of commercial culture in the upper echelons of post-Napoleonic Russian society. This loss of value, which is represented as a gradual and complete disintegration, appears most clearly in the sequence of landowners encountered by Chichikov.”21 For Valentino, the novel presents an allegory “of emerging Russian commercialism,” it is “an echo of the whole transformation of Russia,” a “depiction of the progress of the commercial ethic in Russia” with its unprecedented “rise of ‘monied interests.’”22 Set against the five landowners as representatives of the “stagnant” world of aristocracy, facing an ongoing economic revolution, Chichikov thus becomes the agent “of social change.”23 For a conservative of Gogol’s ilk this change must have been felt as a threat comparable to the Napoleonic invasion—which is one of Valentino’s points. Many of his subtle observations thus actually support the present interpretation. For James B. Woodward, too, Dead Souls is a systematically developed allegory—but one of an altogether different kind: —an allegory that hinges on the portrayal of spiritual perversion as a divergence from the symbolic ideal of “pure femininity.” Distinguishing between five main types of perversion, Gogol first introduces them individually in chapters two through six, associating each with a specific range of psychological attributes conveyed by recurrent symbolic motifs. … At the same time

19 20 21 22 23

(or: aporia/consternation/shock), ignorance, and reversal/conversion. Vaiskopf projects this scheme onto the five landowners (Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 384): ­Manilov’s dreamy melancholy, Korobochka’s fear, Nozdrev’s disturbing belligerence, ­Sobakevich’s scornful rejection of enlightenment, and Pliushkin’s moral fall and planned later resurgence. Vaiskopf ’s scheme is interesting and allows for the special role of Pliushkin, but it needs to be worked out in detail before any judgment can be made about its validity. Ibid., 386. Russell Scott Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls,” ­Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 543–562, 545. Ibid., 544. Ibid., 551, 560, 561, 546. Ibid., 562, 561.

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indicators of all five types are also woven into the portrait of Chichikov, whose meetings with the landowners … may accordingly be viewed as a journey through a hall of mirrors in which he is unwittingly confronted with manifestations of his own corruption.24 Of all interpretations, this is closest to the reading suggested here.25 Other scholars give up the quest for meaning altogether, dismissing the very idea of a system behind Gogol’s landowners—an approach, if I may say so, that brings them perilously close to Chichikov’s own position: his blindness to the hidden sense of his five encounters is explicitly reflected upon in an early version of Dead Souls: He did not even ask why he came across these people, just as we generally fail to ask why precisely these circumstances impinge on us and not others, why precisely these persons surround us and not others—although not even the least of life’s happenings is in vain and all around us serves our education and reproof.26 Boris Eikhenbaum’s famous essay of 1918 on Gogol’s Overcoat probably launched this line of thought. For him Dead Souls was no more than “a host of

24 James B. Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 252 (see also ibid., xii–xiii and idem, “Gogol’s ‘Mertvye dushi’: The Epic as Analogue,” Die Welt der Slaven 29 [1984]: 1–17) overlooks the systematic connection between Chichikov‘s prehistory and the stages of the chronicle and hence fails to notice what is a—if not the—­ essential key to the allegory he rightly suspects to underlie Dead Souls. 25 Donald Fanger also compares the portraits of the landowners with mirrors in which Chichikov confronts himself, and suggests a vague connection between these and Chichikov’s biography, without, however, acknowledging the system that lies behind this: “Manilov now appears as a hyperbolic parody of Chichikov’s main quality, decorum; Korobochka represents a naive variant of his suspicious canniness in bargaining; Nozdryov shows more than comparable resourcefulness in prevarication, though his is instinctive and motiveless; Sobakevich manifests the calculating side of Chichikov, with its implicit misanthropy laid bare; and Plyushkin represents the passionate side of his acquisitiveness, showing how, unchecked, it can destroy the family life to which Chichikov so eagerly looks forward. … The portrait gallery of the book is thus a gallery of mirrors as well” (Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 170f.). 26 “Он даже и не задал себе запроса, зачем эти люди попали ему на глаза, как вообще все мы никогда не спрашиваем себя, зачем нас окружили такие‑то обстоятельства, а не другие, зачем вокруг нас стали такие‑то люди, а не другие, тогда как ни малейшее событие в жизни не произошло даром, и всё вокруг в наше наученье и вразумление” (VI, 690).

Ethos and Epic

individual scenes linked only by Chichikov’s travels,”27 and he deduced from the known fact of Gogol’s difficulty in finding suitable subjects for his work28 that the composition “cannot be dependent on the subject”29—a conclusion that, however unconvincing, has been taken up with some eagerness. Thus Richard Freeborn could still write in 1973: A sequential plot based on a logical concatenation of happenings seems to be unimportant to Gogol; it is certainly unimportant in Dead Souls where the meetings between Chichikov and the landowners occur without logical order. … They could be rearranged with no detriment to one’s enjoyment of the novel.30 Iury Mann, too, draws—from his pertinent insight that Bely’s scheme oversimplifies Gogol’s novel—the less rewarding conclusion that the book cannot have a unified principle of construction.31 A variant of this view is found in Andrei Sinyavsky’s study of Gogol, one of the most important to issue from exile: “One can readily double the number of Chichikov’s visits—it will simply prove the impossibility of destroying the structure of the work, as if the saying held equally good here that deep pockets do no harm.”32 This cannot be allowed to stand. The image of pockets copious enough to hold the products of an infinitely fertile mind is less appropriate to Dead Souls than Gogol’s own figure of a casket worked in obedience to the strictest rules of poetic economy. There is room in that firmly structured space for not a single landowner more than his five, for the stages of Chichikov’s journey follow a strict plan that allows neither insertions nor omissions. This plan—if we can believe Gogol’s later assertions—did not exist at the beginning of Dead Souls, but grew in clarity as the work progressed.33 In the “Author’s Confession” we read:

27 Boris Eichenbaum, “Wie Gogols ‘Mantel’ gemacht ist,” in his Aufsätze zur Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur, selected and trans. Alexander Kaempfe (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1965), 120. 28 See also letter to Pushkin, October 7, 1835 (X, 375). 29 Eichenbaum, “Wie Gogols ‘Mantel’ gemacht ist,” 120. 30 Richard Freeborn, The Rise of the Russian Novel. Studies in the Russian Novel from “Eugene Onegin” to “War and Peace” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 91. 31 Iurii V. Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 309–310. 32 Andrej Sinjawskij, Im Schatten Gogols, trans. S. Geier (Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna: Propyläen, 1979), 266. 33 On this point see especially Iurii V. Mann, V poiskakh zhivoi dushi. “Mertvye dushi”: pisatel′, kritika, chitatel′ (Moscow: Kniga, 1984), 7–125.

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Pushkin thought the concept of Dead Souls particularly suited to me because it granted me the freedom to travel the length and breadth of Russia with my hero and to depict a multitude of the most different characters. I had started writing without a detailed plan and without reflecting on what the hero should actually represent. I simply thought that the comic project with whose accomplishment Chichikov is occupied would of itself present me with diverse persons and characters and that the laughter rising within me would without more ado create a horde of strange creatures which I would then mix at will with more affecting ones. But at every step I was beset by questions: Why? What’s the point of that? What can such a character mean? What does such a creature express? Above all, what should one do in the face of such questions? Should one drive them away? I tried to, but they obstinately remained. Moreover, I was unable to apply myself to drawing this hero or that unless I perceived some inherent necessity in the task. Yet what I experienced was rather disinclination, and all that issued from it was forced and violent, and even what I had laughed at turned sad and sour. I saw unmistakably that without a precise and lucid plan I would not be able to write further; that an author must become clear in his mind about the purpose of his work, its essential usefulness and necessity, before he can burn with genuine zeal and honest love for his task—that love which can do all things and without which no work will leave one’s hand.34 34 “Пушкин находил, что сюжет М д хорош для меня тем, что дает полную свободу изъездить вместе с героем всю Россию и вывести множество самых разнообразных характеров. Я начал было писать, не определивши себе обстоятель­ ного плана, не давши себе отчета, что такое именно должен быть сам герой. Я думал просто, что смешной проект, исполненьем которого занят Чичиков, наведет меня сам на разнообразные лица и характеры; что родившаяся во мне самом охота смеяться создаст сама собою множество смешных явлений, которые я намерен был перемешать с трогательными. Но на всяком шагу я был останавливаем вопросами: зачем? к чему это? что должен сказать собой такой‑то характер? что должно выразить собою такое‑то явление? Спрашивается: что нужно делать, когда приходят такие вопросы? Прогонять их? Я пробовал, но неотразимые вопросы стояли передо мною. Не чувствуя существенной надобности в том и другом герое, я не мог почувство­вать и любви к делу изобразить его. Напротив, я чувствовал что‑то в роде отвращенья: всё у меня выходило натянуто, насильно и даже то, над чем я смеялся, становилось печально. Я увидел ясно, что больше не могу писать без плана, вполне определительного и

Ethos and Epic

The course of Chichikov’s journey, then—in this Fanger, Gerigk, and Bely are right—is exactly determined; but it represents neither a panoptic view of life’s modalities nor a solution to the riddle of the Sphinx, nor does it revisit Dante’s Inferno. Chichikov’s hell is of his own making; in it he meets not the great ones of the world but the shadows of his own past.35 Moving from one landowner’s estate to the next he retraces the decisive phases of his life. But Gogol has veiled what is in itself a simple story so skillfully that its meaning is easily overlooked. Rather than casting the veil aside in a single sweep, however, we will for the time being lift only a corner, sketching in broad outline the ground plan of Dead Souls before we take further steps into its inner spaces.

ясного, что следует хорошо объяснить прежде самому себе цель сочиненья своего, его существенную полезность и необходимость, вследствие чего сам автор возгорелся бы любовью истинной и сильной к труду своему, которая животворит всё и без которой не идет работа” (VIII, 440–441). 35 The interpretation proposed here questions any attempt to read Dead Souls as essentially a caricature of contemporary Russian reality—a tendency found primarily among Soviet scholars, but still alive in the cliché of the allegedly “realist” Gogol maintained by some recent Western research (see, for example, Edmund Heier, Literary Portraiture in Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose [Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1993], 110–112).

31

Figure 4. Excerpt from Gogol’s drafts for Chapter XI of Dead Souls: Chichikov ’s prehistory

CHAPTER 2

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

That … the epic poem is more wide-ranging and, because of the relative independence of its parts, more loosely knit, should not lead one to think that it could go on and on. Poetically, like every other artwork, it must form a rounded organic whole. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics1 Chichikov’s life, we are told, “begins darkly,” the “dreary picture of his early childhood” marked by an unbending father who curbs the child’s vivid fantasy with the injunction “Thou shalt not lie.” Set to the task of writing, the boy is rudely forbidden “to add a flourish to a letter.” This is roughly the sum of his paternal education. His father gives him only one further piece of substantial advice: Don’t treat or regale anybody, but rather manage things so that you’ll be the one treated and, most of all, take care of each copper and save it: money is the most reliable thing in this world. Your comrade or your friend will fool you and, when it comes to trouble, will be the first to betray you, but the copper will never betray you, no matter what trouble you may get into.2 With these words Chichikov is sent off to school. The diabolic nature of his father’s admonition is evident from a glance at a work Gogol (as has often been 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 15, 331. 2 “Темно и скромно происхождение нашего героя” (VI, 224); “вот бедная картина первоначального его детства” (VI, 224); “Не угощай и не потчевай никого, а веди себя лучше так, чтобы тебя угощали, а больше всего береги и копи копейку: эта вещь надежнее всего на свете. Товарищ или приятель тебя надует и в беде первый тебя выдаст, а копейка не выдаст, в какой бы беде ты ни был” (VI, 225); for further references see p. 41 below.

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observed)3 deeply cherished: Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. There one reads of the one real friend a Christian can rely on in misfortune: “Rare is the friend who remains faithful through all his friend’s distress. But You, Lord, and You alone, are entirely faithful in all things; other than You, there is none so faithful.”4 In contrast, the worldview Chichikov senior proposes as an educational program for his son is essentially confined to replacing the image of God with that of Mammon, and the son soon shows how thoroughly he has learned that lesson: He had suddenly surmised and grasped what was what and managed things in his relations with his schoolmates in such a way that they treated him, whereas he not only never treated them but even at times, having hoarded what he had received, would subsequently sell it to the very ones who had treated him with it.5 Toward his teacher he acted the perfect pupil until the poor man fell into need; then he was ready to proclaim his “compassion,” so long as it cost him nothing: It cannot be said … that the nature of our hero was really so harsh and callous … that he knew neither pity nor compassion. He felt both the one and the other; he was even willing to help, but only if that help did not call for a great sum, only if it did not involve his having to touch that money which he had definitely proposed to leave untouched. In short, his father’s admonition, “Take care of each copper and save it,” had had its beneficial effect.6 In his first appointment in the civil service Chichikov began to court the pockmarked daughter of his superior, “treating the daughter as a fiancée, calling the Registrar his dear papa and kissing his hand. Everyone in the Treasury assumed 3 See especially Dmitrij Tschižewskij, “Der unbekannte Gogol’,” in his “Gogol’ Studien,” in ­Gogol’—Turgenev—Dostoevskij—Tolstoj. Zur russischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. ­Ulrich Busch et al. (Munich: Fink, 1966), 57–87, here: 73–75. See also Hildegund Schreier, Gogol’s religiöses Weltbild und sein literarisches Werk. Zur Antagonie zwischen Kunst und Tendenz (Munich: Sagner, 1977), 24–70. 4 Thomas à Kempis, Des Thomas von Kempen vier Bücher von der Nachfolge Christi, trans. Joh. Michael Sailer; ed. A. Gläser (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1926), bk. 3, chap. 45. 5 “Он вдруг смекнул и понял дело и повел себя в отношении к товарищам точно таким образом, что они его угощали, а он их не только никогда, но даже иногда, припрятав полученное угощенье, потом продавал им же” (VI, 225–226). 6 “Нельзя … сказать, … чтобы он не знал ни жалости, ни сострадания; он чувствовал и то и другое, он бы даже хотел помочь, но только, чтобы не заключалось это в значительной сумме, чтобы не трогать уже тех денег, которых положено было не трогать, словом, отцовское наставление: береги и копи копейку—пошло впрок” (VI, 228).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

that by the end of February, before Lent, the wedding would take place.”7 But his prospective father-in-law had hardly found him a post when all talk of marriage abruptly ceased. For his career Chichikov would consistently cast every human bond aside, true only to one principle, the kopeck. The narrator exclaims in horror: “Take along with you, then, on setting out upon your way, as you emerge from the gentle years of youth into stern, coarsening manhood, take along with you all the humane impulses, abandon them not on the road; you will never retrieve them after!”8 The exclamation, however, is directed not at Chichikov but at the moneygrubbing Pliushkin, who has truly imbibed the substitution of Mammon for God, handling money with the awe “with which an old woman receives the Eucharistic bread.”9 Consistently enough, this high priest of Mammon is delighted when his guest, contrary to his expectations, declines the proffered hospitality: Chichikov … [said] that he had already dined and wined. “You have already dined and wined!” Pliushkin exclaimed. “Why, of course, one can always tell a man who moves in good society no matter where he is—he doesn’t eat, yet he’s full. …”10 The buyer of souls duly declares his interest in Pliushkin’s dead serfs as an act of “commiseration” for an elderly man: “Yes, but commiseration isn’t anything you can put in your ­pocket,” Pliushkin remarked. … Chichikov made an attempt to explain that his commiseration was not at all of the same sort … that he was ready to prove this not in empty words but in deeds, and … announced right then and there his readiness to assume the obligation of paying taxes on all those serfs who had died. …11   7 “[С] дочерью обращался как [с] невестой, повытчика звал папенькой и целовал его в руку; все положили в палате, что в конце февраля, перед великим постом, будет свадьба” (VI, 230).   8 “Забирайте же с собою в путь, выходя из мягких юношеских лет в суровое ожесточающее мужество, забирайте с собою все человеческие движения, не оставляйте их на дороге: не подымете потом!” (VI, 127)   9 Probably with the censors in view (see Lorenzo Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit im Schaffen von N.V. Gogol’ [Bern, Frankfurt, New York, and Paris: Lang, 1986], 177), Gogol altered the earlier version quoted here before Dead Souls went to print. The original Russian reads: “как набожная старуха принимает просфору” (VI, 770; see VI, 325). 10 “Чичиков … сказа[л], что он уже и пил и ел. ‘Пили уже и ели!’—сказал Плюшкин. ‘Да, конечно, хорошего общества человека хоть где узнаешь: он и не ест, а сыт …’” (VI, 125). 11 “‘Да ведь соболезнование в карман не положишь’,—сказал Плюшкин. … Чичиков постарался объяснить, что его соболезнование совсем не такого рода …, что он не

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The old miser—after initial hesitation—is so touched that, thinking his benefactor of an age when a man would likely be courting, he contemplates making Chichikov an appropriate present: “Left to himself, he even thought of how he might show his gratitude to his recent caller for such a really unparalleled magnanimity. ‘I’ll make him a present,’ he reflected to himself, ‘of my pocket watch. … He’s still a young man, so he has to have a watch to make his fiancée like him.’”12 One need only align these three brief excerpts from the Pliushkin episode with the previously cited paragraphs from Chichikov’s career to notice some striking parallels. Hidden in the Pliushkin texts are the shades of three former Chichikovs: the child forbidden to exercise hospitality, the schoolboy for whom compassion remains an empty word, and the young official for whom courtship is purely a means to further his career. Such a recurrence of parallels suggests that Chichikov is confronted in the figure of the aged penny-pincher with his own money-conscious youth. However, this aspect remains as hidden from him as it does from the rapid reader. Gogol’s symbolically charged psychology needs several readings to reveal its contours. Meanwhile, Chichikov leaves Pliushkin’s estate, his casket happily laden with 120 dead souls and 78 runaways. From the programmatic thrift of his youth he moves to the next stage of his education: white-collar criminality. Installed in a post gained by stealth, he becomes a devoted antagonist—but at the same time an adept—of corruption, taking bribes on every hand until he is confronted with a superior who is a yet more resolute “enemy of corruption and untruth of any kind.”13 The landowner Sobakevich—literally “son of a bitch”—should actually remind him of that earlier stage in his life, for corruption is his hobbyhorse. To the amazed Chichikov he denounces the most honorable citizens of the town as crooks: “There’s only one decent man in the place, and in truth he too is a swine.”14 But this does not prevent him in the next breath from stitching up his guest, selling his dead at an exorbitant price, including one who is doubly non-existent—the sonofabitch has forged the name. In fact Sobakevich’s obsession with exposing corruption conceals a possessively self-interested, veritably Chichikovian, concept of the

пустыми словами, а делом готов доказать его, и … тут же изъявил готовность принять на себя обязанность платить подати за всех крестьян, умерших …” (VI, 122). 12 “Оставшись один, он даже подумал о том, как бы и чем возблагодарить гостя за такое, в самом деле, беспримерное великодушие. ‘Я ему подарю,—подумал он про себя,— карманные часы: … он человек еще молодой, так ему нужны карманные часы, чтобы понравиться своей невесте!’” (VI, 130) 13 “враг взяточников и всего, что зовется неправдой” (VI, 232). 14 “Один там только и есть порядочный человек …, да и тот, если сказать правду, свинья” (VI, 97).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

relation between language and reality: On his estate “every object, every chair, seemed to be saying: ‘I, too, am Sobakevich!’” 15 Nozdrev, Sobakevich’s neighbor, has for his part lost all conception of the referential value of language: one moment he calls a thing by one name, and the next by another. Words dissolve in his mouth like grape sugar. Introducing Chichikov to his estate, he declares: “There’s the boundary! … Everything that you see on this side is all mine, and even on the other side … it’s all mine, too.”16 The wheeler-dealer, on leaving, is bathed in sweat: he has narrowly escaped a mugging and is not a single soul richer. Nor is it a coincidence that he meets his match in Nozdrev, the very embodiment of transgression; for here, too, he is confronted point by point with the ghost of his past as a customs officer whose flouting of frontiers—real as well as notional—in the performance of his duty is now played back to him: the incursions into coat linings that brought sweat to the brow of many a traveler, the inordinacy of his own smuggling activities, and the absurdity with which he then spoils everything by a paltry quarrel with his accomplice: “Chichikov called the other official a priest’s son, while the other, who actually was a priest’s son, became for some reason sorely offended and … lodged secret information against Chichikov.”17 It is, then, with perfect symmetry that the card-sharp Nozdrev denounces Chichikov when the traveler in souls accuses him of not playing straight. Cast summarily “into the dirt”18 on dismissal from his customs post, Gogol’s central character does not, however, need long to recover. He takes up the profession of legal agent—not at the time a highly respected line of business but one that leads him to the “most inspired idea”19 he has yet had: the project with the dead souls. A particularly attractive aspect of this undertaking is that “it seems so improbable that no one will believe it …”20—a lack of credibility that the old lady Korobochka confirms more emphatically than he would like. Thrown literally

15 “каждый предмет, каждый стул, казалось, говорил: и я тоже Собакевич!” (VI, 96). 16 “‘Вот граница!’—сказал Ноздрев: ‘всё, что ни видишь по эту сторону, всё это мое, и даже по ту сторону …, всё это мое’” (VI, 74). 17 “Чичиков назвал другого чиновника поповичем, а тот, хотя действительно был попович, неизвестно почему обиделся жестоко и … послал еще на него тайный донос” (VI, 237). 18 “в грязь” (VI, 239). On Chichikov’s affinity with dirt see Elena A. Smirnova, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi” (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 127; see also the text from VI, 93, already cited in the Introduction, which sees the Governor’s daughter at a decisive crossroads between “trash” and “miracle.” 19 “вдохновеннейшая мысль” (VI, 239). 20 “А главное, то хорошо, что предмет‑то покажется совсем невероятным, никто не поверит” (VI, 240).

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“into the mud” before her door by his drunken coachman,21 Chichikov, ever the survival artist, seeks to use even this circumstance for a profitable trading opportunity. However, he has not reckoned with the lady of the house who, like him, regards absolutely everything as a potential object of barter, but at the same time deeply mistrusts wares whose market value she does not know. “That,” she objects with reference to the sale of souls, “is something we’ve never had before.”22 The argument, which Chichikov thought to be his own trump card, maddens him. What he sought to achieve by virtuoso trickery—to close the gap between fiction and reality—she achieves by sheer naïvety: she does not even see the gap. Hence her superstitious fear of names and their power to conjure reality; hence, too, her bafflement at the idea of a transaction that “only takes place on paper.”23 “Well, maybe,” she suggests in an attempt to explain her guest’s interest in them, the dead “can come in handy around the place somehow.”24 But it is when she sets off for the town to compare prices after the deal has been struck that things get too hot for Chichikov: his female alter ego finally drives him to flight. The career resumé of Gogol’s character appended to the final chapter of Dead Souls ends at the exact point where the plot of the novel begins: with the execution of Chichikov’s plan. We learn only of a cost-cutting detail—the dead serfs are to be acquired “more through friendship than by purchase”25—before the biographical sketch closes. The narrator peruses his character once more through a markedly rosy lens (“A scoundrel. Why straight away a scoundrel?”) and dives forthwith into an excursus on the human passions—just such an excursus as prefaces Chichikov’s visit to Manilov, the first of the landowners. Manilov views the whole world through rose-tinted spectacles and pursues a cult of friendship from which he secretly hopes to gain professional advancement. The circle, we observe, is slowly closing; for here, too, Chichikov is confronted with himself. But on this occasion his boldness pays: his host initially takes the inquiry about deceased serfs to be no more than a conversational gambit, an exercise in “good style,”26 and then hands over all his dead souls free of charge. That, roughly, is the architectonic structure of Dead Souls.27 Each of the two wings of the building—to pursue the metaphor—has a suite of five rooms; one

21 “в грязь” (VI, 42; see p. 75 below). 22 “товар такой странный, совсем небывалый” (VI, 54). 23 “только на бумаге” (VI, 51, 54). 24 “А может, в хозяйстве‑то как‑нибудь под случай понадобятся” (VI, 53). 25 “если можно, более дружбою, а не покупкою приобрести мужиков” (VI, 241). 26 “Может быть, вы изволили выразиться так для красоты слога?” (VI, 35). 27 Gogol himself spoke in architectonic terms of his “poem”: see letter to Zhukovsky, June 26, 1842; XII, 70.

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

of these enjoys the full light of the narrative present, while the other lies in the shadow of Chichikov’s past. The two suites are strictly symmetrical, each room in the present having its correlative in the past. But in their sequence the rooms are the inverted image of each other, so that the two wings converge, the visit to Pliushkin mirroring Chichikov’s childhood and the start of his career as an official, and the visit to Manilov the beginning of his dealing in souls (see Table 1). Table 1.  Structure of Dead Souls Pliushkin  Childhood / Civil service        Sobakevich         Building commission       Nozdrev              Customs post     Korobochka                Legal agent   Manilov                     Dealer in souls Chronicle                         Prehistory

Figure 5. Demons of greed and avarice (eighteenth-century Russian image)

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1. Pliushkin The remaining sections of Part One of this study will follow, in chronological order, the episodes of Chichikov’s life outlined in the prehistory (see Table 1 above) as the basis for a closer investigation of the symmetries they invoke with the novel’s main chronicle. Accordingly, the first episode to offer itself for scrutiny is that of the landowner Pliushkin.

a)  Young Man and Old A first, albeit vague, indicator of the affinity of the oldest of the landowners with the earliest phase of Chichikov’s biography occurs at the very beginning of the Pliushkin chapter, where the narrator launches into an elegiac recollection of childhood as a time of unbridled fantasy: In former days, long ago, during the years of my youth, during the years of my childhood, now as irretrievably fled as a gleam of light, it was a gladsome thing for me to be driving up for the first time to some unfamiliar place; … the curious eye of the child would discover a great deal that was curious about the place. … A petty clerk of the district administration might happen to pass by me, and I would already be in deep thought: whither was he bound … and what would the talk be about. …   Now I drive up apathetically to every unfamiliar village and look apathetically at its vulgar appearance. … Oh, my youth! Oh, my fresh vigor!28 The opening phase of Chichikov’s actual life, on the other hand, is clouded over with a precocious senescence.29 Gogol plays here with a hagiographic cliché cultivated, above all, in the Eastern Church: the topos of puer senex, the aged 28 “Прежде, давно, в лета моей юности, в лета невозвратно мелькнувшего моего детства, мне было весело подъезжать в первый раз к незнакомому месту: … любопытного много открывал в нем детский любопытный взгляд. … Уездный чиновник пройди мимо—я уже и задумывался: куда он идет, … и о чем будет веден разговор … ? … Теперь равнодушно подъезжаю ко всякой незнакомой деревне и равнодушно гляжу на ее пошлую наружность. … О моя юность! о моя свежесть!” (VI, 110–111) 29 See Gogol’s description of his first foreign journey at the age of twenty; on arrival in Lübeck he wrote to his mother: “Я въехал так, как бы в давно знакомую деревню, которую привык видеть часто. Никакого особенного волнения не испытал я” (X, 154).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

boy.30 However, where the lives of the saints and associated religious myths are bent on demonstrating the wondrous spirituality of their youthful heroes, Chichikov junior is overcome by what one can only call a youthful senility. His father “an ailing man, in a long frock coat lined with lambskins, and knitted scuffs on his bare feet, gasping incessantly as he wandered through the room,”31 does all he can to strangle any stirring of imagination in his son and plunges him as early as possible into the mental dullness that the narrator takes to be the prerogative of age: … eternally sitting on a bench with a quill in his hand, ink on his fingers and even on his lips, the eternal copybook maxims before his eyes: “Tell no lies,” “Obey your elders,” and “Cherish virtue within your heart”; the eternal scraping and flip-flapping of the scuffs through the room; the voice, familiar yet always stern: “Up to your foolish tricks again?” resounding at the moment when the child, bored with the monotonousness of his task, would add some curlicue or a little tail to a letter. …32 The analogy is striking: where the adult Chichikov is led to Pliushkin via a digression into the fantasy world of childhood, the fantasy of the child Chichikov is forestalled by the Pliushkin-like figure of his father. The affinity of the aged landowner to Chichikov senior is unmistakable; Gogol leaves no room for doubt that the child is systematically instilled with “Pliushkinian” qualities: “Even as a child,” we are told, “he already knew how to deny himself in everything”33—

30 See Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 6th ed. (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), 108–112. Drubek‑Meyer observes that Gogol “read every day from the lives of the saints and stylized his own life like a hagiography” (Natascha Drubek‑Meyer, Gogol’s eloquentia corporis. Einverleibung, Identität und die Grenzen der Figuration [Munich: Sagner, 1998], 296). Chichikov’s biography makes further allusions to this genre. See V. Sh. Krivonos, “Biografiia Chichikova v sostave ‘Mertvykh dush,’” in Tipologicheskie kategorii v analize literaturnogo proizvdeniia kak tselogo (Kemerovo: Izdatel′stvo Kemerovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1983), 99–102; and Sergei A. Goncharov, “O zhanrovom ‘kontekste’ ‘Mertvykh dush,’” ibid., 56. 31 “отец, больной человек, в длинном сюртуке на мерлушках и в вязаных хлопанцах, надетых на босую ногу, беспрестанно вздыхавший” (VI, 224). 32 “вечное сиденье на лавке, с пером в руках, чернилами на пальцах и даже на губах, вечная пропись перед глазами: ‘Не лги, послушествуй старшим и носи добродетель в сердце’; вечный шарк и шлепанье по комнате хлопанцев, знакомый, но всегда суровый голос: ‘опять задурил!’, отзывавшийся в то время, когда ребенок, наскуча однообразием труда, приделывал к букве какую‑нибудь кавыку или хвост” (VI, 224; emphasis U.H.). 33 “Еще ребенком он умел уже отказать себе во всем” (VI, 226).

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an attitude that anticipates the avarice, which in the old man has turned into an ascetic discipline. Pliushkin is the incarnation of the educational doctrine of Chichikov’s father, to count every copper, save unremittingly, and trust no man. Intent on emphasizing the masculine influence in the formation of Chichikov’s character, Gogol refrains from giving him even the shadow of a mother. Even at the scene of his birth she is mentioned only indirectly, present only in the term “parents” and in the exclamation of a “female relative who was present at his birth”: “He didn’t come out at all the way I thought he would! He ought to have taken after his grandmother on his mother’s side … but instead of that he was born simply, ‘neither like his mother nor like his dad, but like some unknown, passing lad.’”34 Gogol does not even trouble to make Chichikov’s father a widower; to his narrator the mother is not even worth a mention.

b)  Windows of the Soul But there are still finer threads linking the Pliushkin visit to Chichikov’s youth. Past and present, prehistory and chronicle are spun together not only in their biographical details, but also in their narrative and expressive structures. The same metaphorical language is used, for example, to describe Chichikov’s entry into the world—which actually resembles a complete withdrawal—and Pliushkin’s increasing isolation. For Chichikov, “[l]ife, in the beginning, looked … somewhat sourly and dourly, as if through some turbid little window drifted over with snow; not a friend did he have in his childhood, not a playmate!”35 And at Pliushkin’s house, “[w]ith every year more and more windows were boarded up … until at last but two remained unobstructed, of which one, as the reader has already seen, had been pasted over with paper.”36 In each case, the darkening of the windows signifies the slow death of the human spirit. Gogol has recourse here to a traditional motif37 found, for instance,

34 “Родители были дворяне” (VI, 224); “Совсем вышел не такой, как я думала! Ему бы следовало пойти в бабку с матерней стороны, … а он родился, просто, как говорит пословица: ни в мать, ни в отца, а в проезжего молодца” (VI, 224). 35 “Жизнь при начале взглянула на него как‑то кисло‑неприютно, сквозь какое‑то мутное, занесенное снегом окошко: ни друга, ни товарища в детстве!” (VI, 224) 36 “С каждым годом притворялись окна в его доме, наконец остались только два, из которых одно, как уже видел читатель, было заклеено бумагою …” (VI, 119). 37 See the chapter on the symbolism of windows in Sebastian Neumeister, “Renaissance und Barock: Themen am Beginn der Moderne,” in Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur, vol. 3 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1988), 23–25. Gogol’s choice of metaphor to describe this process, “dead souls,” also has deep roots in tradition (see Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 242f.).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

in Comenius’s depiction of the state of the errant soul in Labyrinth of the World: “But when I looked round a little, my eyes blinking, I perceived in a dim ray of light falling through some cracks a large circular glass window high in the vault of my chamber which was, however, so defiled with dirt that it admitted no gleam of light.”38

c)  Journey into the World In contrast to Pliushkin, Chichikov is granted an opportunity to escape from his spiritual dungeon when his father takes him to school, three days’ journey away. The undertaking is described in terms that prefigure the adult Chichikov’s entry into the antechamber of death at Pliushkin’s residence, but Gogol has disguised the signals so artfully that one has to listen hard to hear them in the singsong melody of the narrative. The Chichikovs’ departure from home is anything but prepossessing: “[T]he father took his son in a miserable little cart, drawn by a little brown skewbald nag, the kind that is known among horse traders as crowbait [soroka = magpie]. …”39 When, later, Chichikov, looking for Pliushkin’s estate, asks the way from two muzhiks, they reveal unasked the old miser’s nickname: “the patched,” a

38 Johann Amos Comenius, Das Labyrinth der Welt und das Paradies des Herzens, trans. Zdenko Baudnik ( Jena: Diederichs, 1908), chap. 37, 245. The following passage in Dead Souls recalls the other half of the title of Comenius’s The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart: “Blessed is he that has sought out the most beautiful of all passions; … he enters ever deeper into the unending paradise of his own soul” (“Блажен избравший себе из всех прекраснейшую страсть; … входит он глубже и глубже в бесконечный рай своей души”; VI, 242). Complementing this is the underlying allegorical idea of the city as symbol of the world (see Dmitrij Tschižewskij, “Das Labyrinth der Welt und Paradies des Herzens des Jan Amos Comenius. Die Thematik und die Quellen des Werkes,” in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. 2: Bohemica [Munich: Fink, 1972], 119). The Labyrinth was only translated into Russian toward the end of the nineteenth century (see David O. Lordkipanidze, Jan Amos Komenskij. 1592–1670 [Moscow: Pedagogika, 1970], 402), although V. K. Bylinin (“‘Labirint mira’ v interpretatsii russkogo poeta pervoi poloviny XVII veka,” in Razvitie barokko i zarozhdenie klassitsizma v Rossii XVII nachala XVIII vv., ed. A. N. Robinson [Moscow: Nauka, 1989], 42–49) discusses the possibility of its distribution already in seventeenth-century Russia. On Gogol’s inspiration from baroque sources see Gavriel Shapiro, Nikolaj Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); for the influence of the Russian baroque on Gogol, see also Smirnova, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi,” 76–77, and Goncharov, “O zhanrovom ‘kontekste’ ‘Mertvykh dush.’” Smirnova’s interest is confined to the influence of Skovoroda and Stefan Javorskij on Gogol (Smirnova, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi,” 62–64). 39 “[О]тец, взявши сына, выехал с ним на тележке, которую потащила мухортая пегая лошадка, известная у лошадиных барышников под именем сороки …” (VI, 224).

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name, the narrator comments, that “will, of its own self, caw with all its corvine throat and … proclaim clearly what nest the bird has flown from.”40 The immediate reference of the nickname is to Pliushkin’s ragged and unkempt appearance, but there is a deeper level to this, for Pliushkin, who hoards any rags, nails and shards he finds on the street, is a metaphorical corvid, a ­human magpie. Two further, similar references confirm the parallel with Chichikov’s early life.41 To assuage his hunger on the way to Pliushkin, Gogol gives his character a cold “loin of mutton”;42 but father and son ate “snacks of … fried mutton” on the only journey they ever took together.43 Again, Chichikov’s return from ­Pliushkin’s realm of death, which begins in a mood of unusual merriment, ends in a pit: “All the way back he was unusually jolly; he whistled in a low key. … It was already dusk when they drove up to town. … Finally the carriage, after a considerable bounce, plunged as if it were sinking into a pit [iama], into the gates of his inn. …”44 A similar fate befell the young Chichikov on his way into the town where he was to go to school—a journey that began with the promise of escape from the sepulcher of his paternal home: [O]ne day, with the first spring sun and the spring freshets, the father took his son in a miserable little cart, … and only on the morning of the third day did they make their way into town. The town streets dazzled the boy’s eyes with their unexpected splendor. … Then the crowbait [soroka] and the cart went kerplunk into a mud puddle [iama]. …45

40 “‘А! заплатанной, заплатанной!’ вскрикнул мужик. … [К]аркнет само за себя прозвище во всё свое воронье горло и скажет ясно, откуда вылетела птица” (VI, 108–109). 41 The “thieving magpie” (“сорока‑воровка”) is also known in Russian. The magpie is anyway a classically satanic attribute (see F. Haase, Volksglaube und Brauchtum der Ostslaven [Breslau: Märtin, 1939], 167). 42 “Хорошо же, что я у Собакевича перехватил ватрушку да ломоть бараньего бока” (VI, 121). 43 “закусывали холодным пирогом и жареною бараниною” (VI, 224). 44 “Всю дорогу он был весел необыкновенно, посвистывал. … Были уже густые сумерки, когда подъехали они к городу. … Наконец бричка, сделавши порядочный скачок, опустилась, как будто в яму, в ворота гостиницы …” (VI, 130–131). 45 “[В] один день с первым весенним солнцем и разлившимися потоками отец, взявши сына, выехал с ним на тележке. … [Т]олько на третий день утром добрались до города. Перед мальчиком блеснули нежданным великолепием городские улицы. … Потом сорока бултыхнула вместе с тележкою в яму …” (VI, 224–225). Significantly, Gogol uses the same word iama (pit) here as in the previous text (see note 44). Guerney’s translation “mud puddle” loses the parallelism in this detail between chronicle and ­prehistory.

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

d)  Years of Apprenticeship Leaving his son with his meager legacy of advice, Chichikov senior departs forever from the scene,46 demonstrating an indifference worthy of the narrator’s earlier comment on Pliushkin’s paternal feelings, who “thenceforth never evinced any interest to learn whether his son was still in this world or not.”47 But his father’s spirit remained firmly with the young Chichikov, who at school encountered a master whose human ideal again consisted in a sort of premature rigor mortis: “Thus spoke this teacher … and was forever telling, with an actual delight in his face and eyes, how in the school where he had previously taught, everything was so quiet that … until the final dismissal bell one could not hear whether there was a living soul in the room.”48 Similar terms are used to describe Pliushkin’s tomb-like lifestyle. His very name may be derived from a Ukrainian word for a flesh fly that feeds on rotting meat: pliukha.49 The impression left on the visitor entering the landowner’s house was that “one could by no means have told that a living creature inhabited this room. …”50 That death, in the shape of hunger, rules Pliushkin’s world is already evident in Sobakevich’s comment that “the convicts in stocks at the prison live better than he does: he’s starved all his people to death.”51 But hunger, we later learn, is also a disciplinary instrument wielded by Chichikov’s first teacher, who lets anyone “starve for days”52 who shows so much as a sign of life under his tutelage. In both instances, however, Chichikov manages to elicit gain from the very misery of the situation: from Pliushkin he buys more souls than from anyone else, and speculating on the ravenous need of his schoolmates, he sells them relief at an exorbitant price: 46 “Давши такое наставление, отец расстался с сыном …, и с тех пор уже никогда он больше его не видел” (VI, 225). 47 “он послал ему от души свое отцовское проклятие и никогда уже не интересовался знать, существует ли он на свете или нет” (VI, 119). Pliushkin’s prior curse on his son distinguishes him at first sight from Chichikov senior—but what, in reality, is the latter’s admonition to his son other than a curse that dogs his footsteps throughout the novel? 48 “Так говорил учитель … и всегда рассказывавший с наслаждением в лице и в глазах, как в том училище, где он преподавал прежде, такая была тишина, что … до самого звонка нельзя было узнать, был ли кто там или нет” (VI, 226–227). 49 For a more detailed account of the many theories regarding the etymology of Pliushkin’s name, see note 203 on p. 168. 50 “Никак бы нельзя было сказать, чтобы в комнате сей обитало живое существо” (VI, 115). 51 Sobakevich’s actual words are: “В тюрьме колодники лучше живут, чем он: всех людей переморил голодом” (VI, 99). 52 “‘Вот ты у меня постоишь на коленях! ты у меня поголодаешь!’ И бедный мальчишка, сам не зная за что, натирал себе колени и голодал по суткам” (VI, 226).

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[H]aving bought food of one sort or another in the market, he would pick a seat during classes near those boys who were better off financially, and as soon as he noticed that one of his schoolmates was becoming queasy—a sure sign of approaching hunger—he would thrust out from under his bench, as though by chance, the end of a gingerbread or a roll and, having aroused the other’s appetite, would demand sums commensurate therewith.53 Systematically schooled by his father in the “mortification of the will,”54 Chichikov “instantly perceived the spirit of this schoolmaster and … did not bat an eye or twitch an eyebrow” throughout his lessons.55 Aware how this behavior might rebound on him, however, he retained his standing among his fellows by taming a mouse for their amusement—and then selling it, of course, at a profit: “He spent two months fussing unremittingly in his room over a mouse he had imprisoned in a small wooden cage and, at last, attained his end: the mouse would stand up on its hind legs … at command. …”56 Gogol conceived a remarkable reincarnation for this mouse in the figure of Pliushkin as he first appeared to Chichikov, furnished with all the features of a two-legged mouse in a wooden cage: [T]he fire in his little eyes had not died out and they darted about under his high, bushy eyebrows very much as mice do when, thrusting out of their dark holes their sharp little snouts, their ears perked and their whiskers twitching, they are spying 53 “[Н]акупивши на рынке съестного, садился в классе возле тех, которые были побогаче, и как только замечал, что товарища начинало тошнить,—признак подступающего голода,—он высовывал ему из‑под скамьи будто невзначай угол пряника или булки и, раззадоривши его, брал деньги, соображаяся с аппетитом” (VI, 226). This aspect of Chichikov’s youthful career is visibly connected to Gogol’s own schooldays. V. I. Lyubich‑Romanovich relates that Gogol kept a supply of candies in his pockets—especially fruit drops and gingerbread. In order to enjoy these unnoticed, but above all to avoid the mockery of his schoolmates, he always sat at the back of the class (quoted in Vikentii V. Veresaev, Gogol′ v zhizni. Sistematicheskii svod podlinnykh svidetel′stv sovremennikov, in his Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh [Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990], vol. 3, 356). Chichikov’s clever program of blackmail reads like a late revenge of the author for the sufferings of his youth. 54 Arthur Schopenhauer, Werke (Zürich: Diogenes, 1977), vol. 2, 485 (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation], vol. 1, §68). 55 “Не шевельнул он ни глазом, ни бровью во всё время класса” (VI, 227). 56 “Два месяца он провозился у себя на квартире без отдыха около мыши, которую засадил в маленькую деревянную клеточку, и добился наконец до того, что мышь становилась на задние лапки …” (VI, 226).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

out whether the cat is lurking about in ambush somewhere or whether some mischievous boy is about. …57 Four characteristics—eyes, eyebrows, mouse, and willful boy—make the associations with Chichikov’s youth all too clear. Not that Chichikov himself perceives it: only the reader is in a position to have that déjà‑vu experience. Chichikov’s next mentor, his superior officer in his first position in the civil service, fulfills the same twofold function: on the one hand a revenant of his father, on the other a foreshadowing of Pliushkin: It fell to his lot to have as his immediate superior a Registrar who had already grown old in the service, who was the personification of indescribably stony insensibility and imperturbability, everlastingly the same, unapproachable; a man who had never in his life shown a smile on his face. … There was just nothing at all in him, either of wickedness or of goodness, and there was a manifestation of something fearful in this absence of everything. His face, as hard as marble, without any sharp irregularity, did not hint at any resemblance to any other face; his features were in severe proportionality to one another. Only the numerous pockmarks and bumps thickly strewn over them made his face one of the number of those upon which, as the folk expression has it, the Devil comes at night to thresh peas. … It looked as if it were beyond any human powers to get at this man and win his good graces, but Chichikov made the attempt. … Finally he got wind of the Registrar’s family life; he learned that the Registrar had a mature daughter, with a face that also looked as though peas were threshed on it at night. It occurred to him to attack the fortress from this side.58

57 “Здесь герой наш поневоле отступил назад и поглядел на него пристально. … [М]аленькие глазки еще не потухнули и бегали из‑под высоко выросших бровей, как мыши, когда, высунувши из темных нор остренькие морды, насторожа уши и моргая усом, они высматри­ вают, не затаился ли где кот или шалун мальчишка …” (VI, 116; emphasis U.H.). Carl R. Proffer, The Simile and Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967), 86, also connects this passage with the final chapter, referring to the comparison there of Chichikov with a cat (VI, 239). The step from mouse to cat is not large, but is unnecessary here, as Gogol already described Chichikov as a mouse-catcher. The place in Chichikov’s biography cited by Proffer corresponds in fact—as will become apparent later—not with the Pliushkin but with the Korobochka episode. 58 “[О]н попал под начальство уже престарелому повытчику, который был образ какой‑то каменной бесчувственности и непотрясаемости; вечно тот же, неприступный, никогда

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And his strategy, as we have learned, was successful—as was the approach he used on Pliushkin: And suddenly some warm ray glided over those wooden features; there appeared an expression of—no, not of emotion, but of a pale reflection of emotion: a phenomenon like that of the unexpected emergence upon the surface of the waters of a drowning man … but … he has come up for the last time. All is over, and yet more fearsome and desolate does the stilled surface of the unresponsive element become thereafter.59 The similarity between the two passages—leaving aside the gradual rather than qualitative difference that Pliushkin’s face is “wooden” rather than “marble”—is striking. In both cases an inhuman lack of feeling is expressed in the smooth, imperturbable surface of the face; and it seems that the immobility of those features is the most frightening thing about the two men—one cannot help thinking of Gogol’s The Nose. And in both cases the stirring of some residual human feeling takes place in connection with a disturbance of this smoothness: on the one hand in the form of pockmarks and on the other in the breaking of the surface of a lake. Nor is it a coincidence that in Pliushkin the sudden incursion of “a pale reflection of emotion” occurs at the very moment when he is reminded of his schooldays: an association with which Gogol builds a bridge to Chichikov’s youth. Both contexts are informed by the motif of friendship: on the one hand as instilled in the young Chichikov by his father; on the other as long since assimilated and practiced by Pliushkin in the form of the kopecks that have в жизни не явивший на лице своем усмешки. … Ничего не было в нем ровно: ни злодейского, ни доброго, и что‑то страшное являлось в сем отсутствии всего. Черствомраморное лицо его, без всякой резкой неправильности, не намекало ни на какое сходство; в суровой соразмерности между собою были черты его. Одни только частые рябины и ухабины, истыкавшие их, причисляли его к числу тех лиц, на которых, по народному выражению, чорт приходил по ночам молотить горох. Казалось, не было сил человеческих подбиться к такому человеку и привлечь его расположение, но Чичиков попробовал. … Наконец он пронюхал его домашню­ю, семейственную жизнь, узнал, что у него была зрелая дочь с лицом, тоже похожим на то, как будто бы на нем происходила по ночам молотьба гороху. С этой‑то стороны придумал он навести приступ” (VI, 229–230). 59 “И на этом деревянном лице вдруг скользнул какой‑то теплый луч, выразилось не чувство, а какое-то бледное отражение чувства, явление, подобное неожиданному появлению на поверхности вод утопающего. … Но … —появление было последнее. Глухо всё, и еще страшнее и пустыннее становится после того затихнувшая поверхность безответной стихии” (VI, 126).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

usurped the place of his one-time friends—it is as if the old miser has become the embodiment of the penny-pinching maxims of Chichikov’s father.60 Even Pliushkin’s invitation to the traveling salesman to drink a cup of tea with him61 has wider associations. In light of Gogol’s figurative pattern of thought, this gesture of hospitality—otherwise unheard of in so miserly a character— can be seen as the reflection of an exactly parallel invitation from Chichikov’s earlier life: “And the ruse met with success: the dour Registrar was swayed and invited him to tea!”62 On both narrative levels the occasion marks Chichikov’s advancement to the condition of fiancé: as a young man, with the real-life daughter of the Registrar; in his encounter with Pliushkin, with the young lady for whose potential conquest the miser parts with the status symbol of a watch. In sum, then, the Pliushkin episode shows Gogol’s central character in the process of development—a coming into being that, paradoxically, is best described as a growing spiritual paralysis. It is entirely consistent with this that Pliushkin is the only figure in the narrative (apart from Chichikov himself) who is granted a life story, a personal development of his own.63 And, despite his advanced state of psychological fossilization, he alone of all the dead souls in the novel would—in Gogol’s unrealized plan—participate in Chichikov’s later resurrection.64

2. Sobakevich The step from simple clerk to registrar was “the most difficult threshold [Chichikov] had to cross. … From then on things went more smoothly and successfully.”65 Gogol’s vocabulary at this point is selected with care from the word-field of transgression, for it is here that the cardinal error of his character is set. All Chichikov’s later failings derive from the pretence of loving where no love exists.

60 See VI, 126. 61 See VI, 124. 62 “и дело возымело успех: пошатнулся суровый повытчик и зазвал его на чай!” (VI, 230). 63 See Mann, Poetika Gogolia, 316. See also Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism,” 559–560. 64 For Gogol’s further plans with this character see Correspondence VIII, 280 (see p. 16 above). A hidden reference to Pliushkin’s soteriological function is the nickname given him by his serfs: “fisher” (rybolov; VI, 117), whose immediate reference to their miserly exploitation conceals a further allusion to Mk. 1:17, where Jesus calls his disciples “fishers of men.” 65 “С этих пор всё пошло легче и успешнее” (VI, 230).

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a)  Amor and Agon Love and deception are, accordingly, the two central motifs of the chapter next to the Pliushkin episode, preceding it in the chronicle but following it in Chichikov’s prehistory. For on his way to Sobakevich the sojourner in the realm of the dead encounters his Beatrice, colliding in his carriage with a barouche carrying an elderly lady and a sixteen-year-old girl. The narrator comments: [A]s, at times, a glittering equipage with gold on its gear, with its picturesque horses, and sparkling because of its gleaming plate glass will suddenly, unexpectedly, speed by some backwoods poverty-stricken hamlet … in much the same way has this blonde suddenly appeared in our narrative, in a perfectly unexpected manner, and has disappeared in the same way. Had there happened to be at the time, instead of Chichikov, some youth of twenty—whether he were a hussar, or a student, or simply one who has just begun the course of his life—Lord! What would not have awakened, what would not have stirred, what would not have found a voice within him! Long would he have stood on the same spot, bereft of all sensation, his eyes staring senselessly into the distance … grown oblivious of self, and of his work, and of the world, and of all things that there are in the world.   But our hero had already reached middle age and was of a circumspectly congealed character. He, too, was plunged into thought and kept thinking on and on, but in a more sedate manner; his thoughts were not so irresponsible and, to some extent, were even most substantial. …   “But it would be interesting to know, of what family is she? … For if, let us suppose, they were to give this girl a dowry of two hundred thousand or so, she might turn out to be a most dainty tidbit.”66 66 “[К]ак иногда блестящий экипаж с золотой упряжью, картинными конями и сверкающим блеском стекол вдруг неожиданно пронесется мимо какой-нибудь заглохнувшей бедной деревушки, … [т]ак и блондинка тоже вдруг совершенно неожиданным образом показалась в нашей повести и так же скрылась. Попадись на ту пору вместо Чичикова какой-нибудь двадцатилетний юноша, гусар ли он, студент ли он или просто только что начавший жизненное поприще, и боже! чего бы не проснулось, не зашевелилось, не заговорило в нем! Долго бы стоял он бесчувственно на одном месте, вперивши бессмысленно очи в даль, … позабыв и себя, и службу, и мир, и всё, что ни есть в мире.

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

The reference to a youth “who has just begun the course of his life” is, of course, to Chichikov’s own youth, which, although it had known no comparable upsurge of feeling, had certainly been informed by a highly utilitarian conception of the business of courting. The degree to which the young Chichikov already resembled a man of “middle age and … of a circumspectly congealed character,” and how little he resembled a twenty-year-old, is evident from the description of an occurrence in his apprentice years that bears a remarkable likeness to the encounter with the colliding carriages: “When some rich man whirled past him in a light, handsome droshky, drawn by thoroughbreds in rich harness, he’d stop as if he were rooted to the spot and then, upon coming to as if after a long sleep, would say: ‘And yet that fellow was nothing but an office clerk … !’”67 The sole epiphany the careerist can imagine comes to him via the social ladder he has set himself to climb. Only very gradually does Chichikov grow out of this perspective. In his later years it is at least the sight of a woman rather than a nouveau riche clerk that wrests him momentarily from the world around him. One can, in fact, say that the older Chichikov gets, the more closely he approximates the years of youth—a paradox to be borne in mind, for the overall concept of Dead Souls is built on it.

b)  Degrees of Lying On both narrative levels of the novel, the idea of marriage marks the gateway to a realm where the supreme law is not merely that of deception but of deception masked as a love of truth—an exponential lie if there ever was one. The matter, already touched upon above, now calls for closer scrutiny: Its contours are first revealed in the irresistible rise of the young Chichikov who, from his newly acquired vantage point as registrar, has secured for himself “what is called a soft thing” (khlebnoe mestechko, lit. a “breadwinning” or lucrative situation).

Но герой наш уже был средних лет и осмотрительно-охлажденного характера. Он тоже задумался и думал, но положительнее, не так безотчетны и даже отчасти очень основательны были его мысли … ‘А любопытно бы знать, чьих она? … Ведь если, положим, этой девушке да придать тысячонок двести приданого, из нее бы мог выдти очень, очень лакомый кусочек’” (VI, 92–93). 67 “Когда проносился мимо его богач на пролетных красивых дрожках, на рысаках в богатой упряжи, он как вкопанный останавливался на месте и потом, очнувшись, как после долгого сна, говорил: ‘А ведь был конторщик …!’” (VI, 228).

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“The reader must be informed,” the narrator continues, that just about that time the severest persecutions were launched against bribery of any sort. Chichikov did not become at all scared of these persecutions but immediately turned them to his own benefit, thus demonstrating a downright Russian ingenuity which appears only during times of stress.68 Adapting with brilliance to the new order, Chichikov declines every direct form of bribery from his petitioners, but lets them wait so long for the various papers they need that they are willing to part with many times the normal sum in backhanders to his subordinates. The paragon of honesty and enemy of corruption reveals himself as a consummate trickster—a quality possessed, however, not only by the civil servant Chichikov but in like measure by the landowner Sobakevich. Gogol highlights the parallel with his reference to the peculiarly ­Russian genius behind the young registrar’s criminal talents, while Sobakevich, “the bear,” has been stylized as the Russian par excellence. The resemblance to Sobakevich increases at each step of Chichikov’s career. The young man becomes a member of “a commission … formed for the building of some government edifice, quite an important one.”69 And, predictably, Chichikov “turned out to be one of its most active members.” What that means becomes immediately apparent: The Commission got down to business without any delay. For six years did this Commission fuss about the building; but either the climate or something stood in the way, or there was some peculiarity in the very nature of the building materials, for the government structure simply couldn’t rise above the foundations, somehow. And yet at the same time, on the outskirts of the town, each one of the members of this Commission turned out to have his own handsome house of metropolitan architecture; evidently the nature of the ground was somewhat better there.70 68 “Нужно знать, что в то же самое время начались строжайшие преследования всяких взяток; преследований он не испугался и обратил их тот же час в свою пользу, показав таким образом прямо русскую изобретательность, являющуюся только во время прижимок” (VI, 230–231). 69 The building in question was originally to have been a religious house (VI, 561), an element Krivonos saw as a parody of the classic hagiographical feature of a monastic foundation (­Krivonos, “Biografiia Chichikova,” 100–101). 70 “Комиссия немедленно приступила к делу. Шесть лет возилась около здания; но климат, что ли, мешал, или материал уже был такой, только никак не шло казенное здание выше фундамента. А между тем в других концах города очутилось у каждого

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

The motif of architectural perdition as the result of conflicting interests—here between governmental plan and executive egoism—awakens echoes of the narrator’s earlier description of Sobakevich’s residence, which, though complete, bore material witness to similar conflicts: One could perceive that, during its erection, the builder had had to struggle incessantly with the taste of the owner. The builder was a pedant and had longed for symmetry; the owner had wanted convenience. … The frontal … had by no means come out in the center of the house, no matter how hard the architect had striven, inasmuch as the owner had ordered one of the side columns to be chucked out, and for that reason only three columns had survived, and not four, as originally intended. The courtyard was surrounded by a fence of solid and inordinately thick wood. This landed proprietor, so it seemed, took great pains to attain solidity.71 There is only one person who could to such an extent assert his desire for comfort above the precepts of order: Sobakevich. He had achieved what his guest had long dreamt of—before the Building Commission provided him with the means to attain it—“an excellently built house” of his own.72

c)  Asceticism and Gluttony It is not just Sobakevich’s residence, however, that reminds one of Chichikov’s activities on the building commission; for it was at that earlier phase of his career that he decided to finally mitigate his “protracted fast,” and demonstrate that he was “not at all averse to sundry delights”73—a change of heart he experiences из членов по красивому дому гражданской архитектуры: видно, грунт земли был там получше” (VI, 232). 71 “Было заметно, что при постройке его зодчий беспрестанно боролся со вкусом хозяина. Зодчий был педант и хотел симметрии, хозяин—удобства. … Фронтон тоже никак не пришелся посреди дома, как ни бился архитектор, потому что хозяин приказал одну колонну сбоку выкинуть, и оттого очутилось не четыре колонны, как было назначено, а только три. Двор окружен был крепкою и непомерно толстою деревянною решеткой. Помещик, казалось, хлопотал много о прочности” (VI, 93–94). 72 “дом, отлично устроенный” (VI, 228). The ethical dimension of the parallel is all the more striking in light of Gogol’s original idea of having the building commission erect a church (“комиссия постройки храма божия”, VI, 56—see Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit, 181–183). 73 “Тут только долговременный пост наконец был смягчен, и оказалось, что он всегда не был чужд разных наслаждений” (VI, 232).

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anew at the home of the good-living landowner, this time in the form of a meal whose excesses are reminiscent of medieval depictions of the Satanic punishment attendant upon the sin of gula (gluttony): The side of mutton was followed by round tarts filled with curds, each of which was considerably bigger than the dinner plates, then a turkey as well-grown as a calf, stuffed with all sorts of good things: eggs, rice, livers, and goodness knows what else that is bound to lie like a stone on one’s stomach. And with that the dinner was brought to an end; but, when they got up from the table, Chichikov felt about thirty-five pounds heavier.74 A second aspect of Chichikov’s turn from asceticism is his dress: he “acquired the habit of wearing shirts of the finest Holland linen,” and, significantly, “began to adhere, for the most part, to scintillating brown and reddish shades”75—the very colors in which his host, a bear of a man, approaches him: [A]s Chichikov glanced at Sobakevich out of the corner of his eye, he looked to him very much like a bear of medium size. To complete the resemblance, the frock coat he was wearing was absolutely the color of a bear’s pelt. … His face was a red-hot, fiery color, the ruddy color you find on a five-kopeck copper.76

d)  The Trickster Tricked The next stage in Chichikov’s career is, as it were, the dialectical response to the previous one: from his lying campaign against the lie he mutates into the deceived deceiver. His new superior, a military man whose appointment to the building commission has already been mentioned, was a declared “foe to all ­bribetakers 74 “За бараньим боком последовали ватрушки, из которых каждая была гораздо больше тарелки, потом индюк ростом в теленка, набитый всяким добром: яйцами, рисом, печенками и ни весть чем, что всё ложилось комом в желудке. Этим обед и кончился; но когда встали из-за стола, Чичиков почувствовал в себе тяжести на целый пуд больше” (VI, 99–100). 75 “с этих пор стал держаться более коричневых и красноватых цветов” (VI, 232). 76 “Когда Чичиков взглянул искоса на Собакевича, он ему на этот раз показался весьма похожим на средней величины медведя. Для довершения сходства фрак на нем был совершенно медвежьего цвета. … Цвет лица имел каленый, горячий, какой бывает на медном пятаке” (VI, 94; emphasis U.H.).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

and of all that is called wrongdoing [nepravda, lit. ‘untruthfulness’]”77—a position of tragic honesty that soon placed him “in the hands of still bigger swindlers.”78 The general had naïvely underestimated the scope of his officials’ “ability to simulate and assimilate”:79 It didn’t take at all long for the officials to catch on to his temperament and character. All who were under his supervision became, with never an exception, awesome persecutors of wrongdoing [nepravda]; everywhere, in all matters, did they pursue it, even as a fisherman with a harpoon pursues some fleshy white sturgeon, and pursued it with such success that in a short while each one of them turned out to have a nest egg of a few thousands.80 The beluga sturgeon referred to here is the largest of the sturgeon family; the deeper meaning of the ichthyological image will be explored later. The only one who does not adapt to the new chief is Chichikov—a surprising failure in a man who is otherwise a human chameleon. All attempts to regain the general’s favor are in vain: he proves the sort of man who “once he got any idea into his head, it was fixed there once and for all, like a nail driven home flush.”81 All Chichikov manages to achieve—by bribing a secretary—is to have the earlier blot on his service record erased, and that only when the intermediary paints “in lively colors the touching plight of Chichikov’s unhappy family, which fortunately Chichikov did not have.”82 This first stumble in the criminal career of Gogol’s central character also has its precise counterpart in the visit to Sobakevich. The immediate parallels have already been touched upon in connection with the ground plan of Dead Souls. But just as Chichikov had with virtuosity, in his first position in the service, transformed the public “persecutions … against bribery”83 into a source of p­ ersonal

77 78 79 80

See p. 36 above. “генерал скоро очутился в руках еще бóльших мошенников” (VI, 233). “умень[е] подделаться ко всему” (VI, 233). “Чиновники вдруг постигнули дух его и характер. Всё, что ни было под начальством его, сделалось страшными гонителями неправды; везде, во всех делах они преследовали ее, как рыбак острогой преследует какую-нибудь мясистую белугу, и преследовали ее с таким успехом, что в скором времени у каждого очутилось по нескольку тысяч капиталу” (VI, 233). 81 “всё равно, что железный гвоздь” (VI, 233). 82 “изобразив ему в живых красках трогательную судьбу несчастного семейства Чичикова, которого, к счастью, у него не было” (VI, 233). 83 “преследование взяток” (VI, 231).

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income, so Sobakevich, who everywhere suspects trickery, adroitly turns to his advantage the fear he implants in his guest that the deal they are pursuing might be made public: “But do you know that purchases of that sort—I am telling you this just among ourselves, out of friendship—aren’t always permissible, and were I, or somebody else, to tell about it, the man that buys them would not have any standing as far as contracts are concerned. …”84 Sobakevich proves himself Chichikov’s equal, accurately mirroring, and indeed exceeding, the behavior the latter had shown in his “snug spot” (khlebnoe mestechko)85 on the building commission. He is the only landowner who beats Chichikov at his own game, taking real money off him for something whose only existence is on paper. Only much later does Chichikov realize how he has been swindled: “And what muzhik is this? Elizaveta the Sparrow! Hell and damnation and the bottomless pit—a wench! How did she ever worm her way in here? That Sobakevich is a scoundrel; even in such a thing he had to take me in!”   Chichikov was right: this was a wench, sure enough. How she had ever got in there no one could tell; but so artfully had she been written out that from a distance one might have taken her for a muzhik, and even her name has been spelled in such a way that, at a careless glance, it might pass for a masculine one [not Elizaveta but Elizavet”].86 Turning Chichikov’s ploy back on its perpetrator, Sobakevich has the trickster roundly tricked. In this respect he resembles the superior officer whose rigorous baring of corruption led to Chichikov’s dismissal—despite the latter’s ostensible vigor in persecuting corruption wherever it appeared. In this light, the resemblance between the landowner and his guest extends not only to Chichikov’s tenure of his “snug spot,” but also to his loss of that spot. 84 “‘Но знаете ли, что такого рода покупки, я это говорю между нами, по дружбе, не всегда позволительны, и расскажи я или кто иной,—такому человеку не будет никакой доверенности относительно контрактов или вступления в какие‑нибудь выгодные обязательства …’” (VI, 104). 85 See Sobakevich’s reflection: “Его не собьешь, неподатлив!” (VI, 104). 86 “‘Это что за мужик: Елизавета Воробей? Фу ты пропасть: баба! она как сюда затесалась? Подлец Собакевич, и здесь надул!’ Чичиков был прав: это была, точно, баба. Как она забралась туда, неизвестно, но так искусно была прописана, что издали можно было принять ее за мужика, и даже имя оканчивалось на букву ъ, то‑есть не Елизавета, а Елизаветъ” (VI, 137).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

Three aspects confirm the equation. First, Sobakevich is the general’s equal in the unyielding stubbornness with which he bargains up the price for his dead souls. Where the general’s obduracy is “like a nail,” he is likened to a piece of iron: “iron,” the narrator observes, “was more apt to catch a cold and start coughing than was this wondrously fashioned landed proprietor.”87 ­Secondly, when Chichikov attempts to soften this iron by appealing to his family ­circumstances—the ploy that had, after all, worked with the unbending general—he is immediately rebuffed: “Sobakevich’s answer was a simple one: “There’s no necessity of my knowing what your circumstances are; I don’t mix into family affairs, that is your own business.”88 Thirdly and finally, Sobakevich, having been cornered by Chichikov on the question of a particular muzhik by the name of Elizaveta Vorobei (the Sparrow), sits down at the celebratory feast for the successful conclusion of the trade in souls and devours a complete sturgeon on his own: Sobakevich … settled down to work on the sturgeon … and, while the others were drinking, chatting and eating, he, in just a little more than a quarter of an hour, finished it all off, so that when the Chief of Police did recall it, saying: “And how will this work of nature strike you, gentlemen?” and had walked up to it with the others, fork in hand, he saw that there was but an inedible tail left of this work of nature. …89 The predilection for this great fish shown earlier by the general’s officials who, in their hunting down of falsehood, acted “even as a fisherman … pursues some fleshy … sturgeon,” is something evidently shared by Sobakevich, the human bear, who on every hand scents lying and deception. And in both cases the quarry provides a more than fulsome meal. Summarizing, we can say that in the Sobakevich chapter Chichikov relives all the central aspects of the second phase of his career: self-serving thoughts of 87 “скорее железо могло простудиться и кашлять, чем этот на диво сформованный помещик” (VI, 144). 88 “Он стал было говорить про какие‑то обстоятельства фамильные и семейственные, но Собакевич отвечал просто: ‘Мне не нужно знать, какие у вас отношения: я в дела фамильные не мешаюсь, это ваше дело’” (VI, 104). 89 “Собакевич … пристроился к осетру, и покамест те пили, разговаривали и ели, он в четверть часа с небольшим доехал его всего, так что, когда полицеймейстер вспомнил было о нем и, сказавши: «А каково вам, господа, покажется вот это произведенье природы?», подошел было к нему с вилкою вместе с другими, то увидел, что от произведенья природы оставался всего один хвост …” (VI, 150).

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marriage, triumph in the guise of a warrior for truth, and defeat at the hands of an adversary who plays the game of deceit even better.

3. Nozdrev Chichikov’s upward progress, which began without tremor or mishap, already gives way in its second phase to an undulating rise and fall that will, despite his unwavering ambition, inevitably mark the rest of his life’s course. Gogol’s intention in penning such a character can scarcely be better expressed than in the words of Thomas à Kempis: As long as you live you will be subject to changeableness in spite of yourself. … But the man who is wise and whose spirit is well instructed stands superior to these changes. He pays no attention to what he feels in himself or from what quarter the wind of fickleness blows, so long as the whole intention of his mind is conducive to his proper and desired end. For thus he can stand undivided, unchanged and unshaken with the singleness of his intention directed unwaveringly toward Me even in the midst of so many changing events. … The eye of your intention, therefore, must be cleansed so that it is single and right. It must be directed toward Me despite all the objects which may interfere.90 So long as Chichikov pursues earthly ends, when these can only ever be means, his upward progress will be inconstant. The next stage in his career confirms this rule, illustrating more clearly than any other the problem of teleology.

a)  The Plans of Mice and Men91 Chichikov’s patience in adversity is nourished by the long-held hope of gaining a position in the customs service:

90 Thomas à Kempis, Nachfolge Christi, bk. 3, chap. 33. 91 See Susanne Fusso’s chapter “Plans and Accidents,” in her Designing Dead Souls. An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 20–51, which expounds with precision Nozdrev’s role as an instrument of fate crossing Chichikov’s plans. The following chapter of the present study takes this idea a step further, showing to what extent Chichikov seeks to establish his own power over fate.

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

It must be said that this branch of the Civil Service had long been the secret object of his designs. … More than once he had said with a sigh: “There’s what one ought to get into … !” … And so he had long been yearning to get into the Customs but had been held back by sundry current benefits accruing from the ­Building Commission, and he had reasoned, justly enough, that the ­Customs was, after all, no more than the proverbial two birds in the bush whereas the Building Commission was an actual bird in the hand. But now he decided, come what may, to gain his way into the Customs—and gain his way he did.92 The author’s almost tedious insistence on this point is worth noting: it is evidently important to him to portray the ensuing events as the result of conscious planning. At this point, careful calculation and incalculable fate seem to have joined hands; indeed the narrator expressly observes of his character that “fate itself had cut him out for a Customs clerk.”93 And Chichikov, for his part, leaves nothing to chance. His “zealously disinterested service”94 finally comes to the notice of his superiors, and he is entrusted with a project he has himself submitted, the breaking of a big smuggling ring: And that was just about all he had been after.   About this time a powerful smuggling syndicate had been formed along well-planned, thoroughly organized lines; the audacious enterprise promised to yield millions in profits. He had long since had information concerning it and had even turned down the emissaries who had been sent to bribe him, saying curtly: “Not yet.” But the moment he had everything placed at his disposal, he let the syndicate know, saying: “Now’s the time.”   His reckoning was all too correct. … [However, so] that the business might be carried on without the least hindrance, he won over another official. …95 92 “Надобно сказать, что эта служба давно составляла тайный предмет его помышлений. … Не раз давно уже он говорил со вздохом: ‘Вот бы куда перебраться!’ … Итак, он давно бы хотел в таможню, но удерживали текущие разные выгоды по строительной комиссии, и он рассуждал справедливо, что таможня, как бы то ни было, всё еще не более как журавль в небе, а комиссия уже была синица в руках. Теперь же решился он во что бы то ни стало добраться до таможни, и добрался” (VI, 234–235). 93 “Казалось, сама судьба определила ему быть таможенным чиновником” (VI, 235). 94 “ревностно‑бескорыстная служба” (VI, 236). 95 “Этого только ему и хотелось. В то время образовалось сильное общество контрабанди­ стов обдуманно-правильным образом; на миллионы сулило выгод дерзкое предприятие.

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That “[h]is reckoning was all too correct” is nicely ambivalent, and the warning it bears is promptly vindicated when the incalculable in the shape of that “other official” breaks into Chichikov’s scheme. What Gogol actually has in mind is revealed when he raises the conflict of contingency and necessity to a cosmic level, invoking both God and the devil, the lord of plans and the advocate of chance, in his depiction of its course: [T]he two officials found that each one had a capital of four hundred thousand rubles. Chichikov, they say, had actually amassed more than five hundred thousand, since he was smarter than the other. God knows to what an enormous figure the goodly sums would have grown, if it were not that some black cat ran across their path. The Devil made the two officials lose their wits: to put it simply, they waxed too fat and kicked their heels and had a falling out over nothing at all.96 In the original Russian this incursion of chance is expressed even more ­idiomatically as an emissary of the devil: nelegkii zver′, an “unclean beast.”97 The outcome of the quarrel, whose details have already been described, was the ­denunciation of Chichikov by his colleague and the subsequent arrest of both parties. C ­ hichikov, oblivious of any personal fault, saw this purely as the fickle hand of fortune: At this point it might be concluded that after such tempests, tribulations, after such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the grievousness of life, he would retire. …

Он давно уже имел сведение о нем и даже отказал подосланным подкупить, сказавши сухо: ‘Еще не время’. Получив же в свое распоряжение всё, в ту же минуту дал знать обществу, сказавши: ‘Теперь пора’. Расчет был слишком верен. … Чтобы дело шло беспрепятственней, он склонил и другого чиновника …” (VI, 236). 96 “[У] обоих чиновников очутилось по четыреста тысяч капиталу. У Чичикова, говорят, даже перевалило и за пятьсот, потому что был побойчее. Бог знает, до какой бы громадной цифры не возросли благодатные суммы, если бы какой-то нелегкий зверь не перебежал поперек всему. Чорт сбил с толку обоих чиновников: чиновники, говоря попросту, перебесились и поссорились ни за что” (VI, 236–237; emphasis U.H.). 97 Here, the adjective nelegkii (literally: uneasy, tough) is derived from nelegkaia [sila], a common euphemism for the devil. See V. P. Zhukov, M. I. Sidorenko, and V. T. Shkliarov, Slovar′ frazeologicheskikh sinonimov russkogo iazyka, ed. V. P. Zhukov (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1987), 244; see also Andreas Ebbinghaus’s analogous comments on the Inspector (“Konfusion und Teufelsanspielungen in N. V. Gogol’s ‘Revizor,’” Russian Literature 34 [1993]: 296–297).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

  But things did not work out that way. … He was filled with grief, with vexation; he murmured against the whole world; he was furious against the injustice of fate … yet, despite everything, couldn’t abstain from making new attempts.98 Chichikov’s incessant efforts to counter the unpredictable waves of fate with the rock of calculation come to grief in exemplary fashion on the landowner Nozdrev, “a fine dashing fellow” 99 who, after a fleeting contact in Chapter One, encounters Chichikov by chance at a wayside inn. But this meeting is already ascribed to the workings of fate: “Well, well, well!” [Nozdrev] cried out suddenly, flinging his arms wide. … “What fates bring you hither?” 100 As if fate alone were not enough, the encounter also collides with Chichikov’s current plan, as becomes evident when the dialogue resumes: “Where are you bound to now?” “Why, I just have to see a certain party,” Chichikov told him. “Oh, what does that certain party matter? Drop him! Let’s go to my place!”101

b)  A Gamblers’ Duel It does not take Chichikov long to see the advantage in this turn of events, and he smartly recalculates his disrupted calculation. Chance might back him, he reckons, for the gambler has just lost at cards: “Well, and why not?” Chichikov thought to himself. “Guess I’ll really drop in at Nozdrev’s. In what way is he worse than the others? Just as human as they, and on top of that he’s lost his shirt gambling. He’s ready for anything and everything, apparently; therefore one may wheedle a thing or two out of him for a song.”102  98 VI, 238; see note 146 for the full Russian text. The last sentence reads: “Он был в горе, в досаде, роптал на весь свет, сердился на несправедливость судьбы …, однако же, не мог отказаться от новых попыток.”  99 “Там, между прочим, он познакомился с помещиком Ноздревым, человеком лет тридцати, разбитным малым, который ему после трех‑четырех слов начал говорить ты” (VI, 17). 100 “‘Ба, ба, ба!’ вскричал он вдруг, расставив обе руки при виде Чичикова. ‘Какими судьбами?’” (VI, 64). 101 “‘Ты куда теперь едешь?’—‘А я к человечку к одному’, сказал Чичиков.—‘Ну, что человечек, брось его! поедем ко мне!’” (VI, 66). 102 “‘А что ж’,—подумал про себя Чичиков: ‘заеду я в самом деле к Ноздреву. Чем же он хуже других? такой же человек, да еще и проигрался. Горазд он, как видно, на всё; стало быть, у него даром можно кое-что выпросить’” (VI, 68–69).

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For this brief pact with the principle of chance he will, however, pay dearly. Nozdrev suggests that they play for the dead souls, and in him Chichikov finds an opponent who is a great deal more practiced than he in the service of fortune: “Well, to decide it by cards means to be subjected to the unknown,” Chichikov said, and at the same time eyed askance the cards in his host’s hands. Both of the decks looked very much like artificial ones to Chichikov, while the very design on the backs of the cards seemed quite suspicious.   “But why the unknown?” scoffed Nozdrev. “There’s nothing of the unknown about it. If there be but luck on your side, you can win a hell of a lot.”103 We only learn much later, in Chapter Ten, how professionally Nozdrev works to ensure fortune’s favor: Nozdrev was taken up with very important business. For four days now he had not left his room. … The business demanded the utmost application: it consisted of matching, out of several gross of playing cards, a single deck, but that one was to have the most recognizable features, so that one might pin one’s faith on it as on a most tried and true friend. There remained enough work for another fortnight at least.104 What for Chichikov is the kopeck is for Nozdrev the game of chance: a trusted friend, a surrogate for all human—and, with a glance at Thomas à Kempis,105 103 “‘Ну, решаться в банк, значит подвергаться неизвестности’,—говорил Чичиков и между тем взглянул искоса на бывшие в руках у него карты. Обе талии ему показались очень похожими на искусственные, и самый крап глядел весьма подозрительно. ‘Отчего ж неизвестности?’—сказал Ноздрев. ‘Никакой неизвестности! Будь только на твоей стороне счастие, ты можешь выиграть чортову пропасть’” (VI, 81). 104 “Ноздрев был занят важным делом; целые четыре дня уже не выходил он из комнаты. … Дело требовало большой внимательности: оно состояло в подбирании из нескольких десятков дюжин карт одной талии, но самой меткой, на которую можно было бы понадеяться, как на вернейшего друга. Работы оставалось еще, по крайней мере, на две недели …” (VI, 207–208; emphasis U.H.). 105 An aspect further emphasized by the narrator when—immediately after Nozdrev’s appearance at the Governor’s ball—the Chairman of the Administrative Offices gets the better of Chichikov’s king of spades, a card in which the latter “had placed his trust as in God” (“Председатель никак не мог понять, как Павел Иванович … подвел даже под обух его пикового короля, на которого он, по собственному выражению, надеялся, как на бога” (VI, 173).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

even divine—allegiance.106 In that sense Nozdrev is the polar opposite of Chichikov: the player versus the assiduous saver—or in psychological terms loss of impulse control against positively necrophile control freakdom. Viewed theologically—or shall we say from a higher perspective—the whole duel amounts to a zero sum game: neither party can enjoy lasting gains, as both are committed to equally false friends. We have already heard Gogol’s spiritual guide on the subject: “Rare is the friend who remains faithful through all his friend’s distress.” This friend is neither Mammon nor fortune, à Kempis teaches, but God.107 The contest for Nozdrev’s souls already begins with the choice of weapons. Here Chichikov wins, as his insistent refusal to enter any game of chance causes his adversary to reduce his demands: [Nozdrev:] “Well, look here, lets have a game of checkers: if you win they’re all yours.” …   [Chichikov:] “You’re putting yourself out for nothing—I’m not going to play.”   [Nozdrev:] “Why, this isn’t like banker; there can be no luck or trickery here—everything depends on skill.” …   [Chichikov, reflecting:] “Suppose I do sit down … and play him a game of checkers. I used to play checkers not so badly, and as for tricks, it would be hard for him to try any in this game.”108 In a transferred sense Chichikov had certainly played checkers before: the narrator uses a board game image to explain his character’s tactical hesitation as a customs officer before the opportunity came to land a real coup: “Hitherto he had not wanted to enter into any relations with the smugglers, since he would have been no more than a common pawn, ergo, he would not have received much, but now … now it was another matter: he could put whatever terms he liked to them.”109

106 See p. 34 above. 107 Thomas à Kempis, Nachfolge Christi, bk. 3, chap. 45. 108 “‘Ну, послушай, сыграем в шашки; выиграешь—твои все …’—‘Напрасен труд: я не буду играть.’—‘Да ведь это не в банк; тут никакого не может быть счастия или фальши: всё ведь от искусства …’—‘Сем-ка я’, подумал про себя Чичиков: ‘сыграю с ним в шашки. В шашки игрывал я недурно, а на штуки ему здесь трудно подняться’” (VI, 83–84). 109 “Прежде он не хотел вступать ни в какие сношения с ними, потому что был не более, как простой пешкой, стало быть немного получил бы; но теперь … теперь совсем другое дело: он мог предложить какие угодно условия” (VI, 236; emphasis U.H.). See also the following passage in Correspondence: “Какой‑нибудь чиновник‑секретарь производит отважно свою пакость в уверенности, что как он ни напакости, о том никто не узнает, потому что и сам он—незаметная пешка” (VIII, 273–274; emphasis U.H.).

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The Russian term translated here as “common pawn” could certainly be used of the simple counters in checkers.110 Nozdrev is not up against a novice; and with Chichikov fighting with his own weapon—as we know, he “was strong in arithmetic”111—the outcome of the duel seems predictable. But Chichikov soon discovers that he is facing the unpredictable. Gogol structures the duel in accordance with the classical dramaturgy of the affaire d’honneur: the third exchange of shots decides the outcome. In this case it is instigated by a flagrant breach of code by Nozdrev: “Very well, if you like!” said Chichikov.   “How many checkers do you give me as a handicap?” asked Nozdrev.   “Why should I? I’m not giving you any handicap, of course.”   “Allow me two moves extra, at least.”   “I don’t want to; I play poorly myself.”   “We know all about you fellows who claim to play poorly!” said Nozdrev, advancing one of his checkers.   “It’s rather a long time since I’ve tried my hand at checkers,” said Chichikov, moving a checker.   “We know all about you fellows who claim to play poorly!” said Nozdrev, advancing one of his checkers.   “It’s rather a long time since I’ve tried my hand at checkers,” said Chichikov, moving a checker.   “We know all about you fellows who claim to play poorly!” said Nozdrev, advancing one of his checkers, but at the same time moving up another one as well with the cuff of his sleeve.   “It’s rather a long time since I’ve tried my hand—hey, there! What’s going on here, brother? You move that back from there!” said Chichikov.   “Move what back?”   “Why, that checker, now,” said Chichikov, and at the same moment perceived, almost under his very nose, still another checker, which, so it seemed, was trying to sneak through into the king’s row. Whence it had bobbed up, God alone could tell.”112 110 According to Vladimir Dal′’s dictionary, peshka is a synonym for shashka (“рядовая, простая шашка, шахматочная пехота”). 111 “Он был в арифметике силен” (VI, 129)—a belittling of mathematical thought taken systematically further by Dostoevsky. 112 “‘Ну, изволь!’—сказал Чичиков. ‘Сколько же ты мне дашь вперед?’—сказал Ноздрев. ‘Это с какой стати? конечно, ничего.’—‘По крайней мере, пусть будут мои два хода.’—

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

The oblique reference to God implies a trial by ordeal (judicium dei). Chichikov loses the contest because he trusts only in the power of his own reason—the reasoning with which he hatches his own careful plans. Such hubris must be punished, and the ensuing quarrel with Nozdrev escalates dangerously. The narrator uses the occasion to embark on an extended image illustrating once again the triumph of incalculable fate over the rationally computed: “Beat him up!” he [Nozdrev] cried out frenziedly, turning to [his servants] Porfirii and Pavlushka. …   “Beat him up!” Nozdrev kept yelling … straining forward … as though he were storming an impregnable fortress. “Beat him up!” He kept yelling in the same sort of voice that some desperate lieutenant … uses to yell “Forward lads!” to his platoon during a great assault. … “Forward lads!” he yells, dashing ahead, without reflecting that he is jeopardizing the plan of attack already decided upon … and that the fateful [rokovaia] bullet … is already whizzing through the air, just about to shut off his vociferous throat.113 Chichikov escapes the imminent assault, thanks, however, not to any calculation on his part but to fate, which is—on this occasion more than any other—­ connected by the narrator with the workings of a providentia beyond human understanding. His game against Nozdrev is an experimentum medietatis gone awry: a failed attempt to put his own rational powers as a self-made man at the center of

‘Не хочу, я сам плохо играю.’—‘Знаем мы вас, как вы плохо играете!’—сказал Ноздрев, выступая шашкой. ‘Давненько не брал я в руки шашек!’—говорил Чичиков, подвигая тоже шашку. ‘Знаем мы вас, как вы плохо играете!’—сказал Ноздрев, выступая шашкой. ‘Давненько не брал я в руки шашек!’—говорил Чичиков, подвигая шашку. ‘Знаем мы вас, как вы плохо играете!’—сказал Ноздрев, подвигая шашку, да в то же самое время подвинув обшлагом рукава и другую шашку. ‘Давненько не брал я в руки! … Э, э! это, брат, что? отсади‑ка ее назад!’—говорил Чичиков. ‘Кого?’—‘Да шашку‑то’,—сказал Чичиков и в то же время увидел почти перед самым носом своим и другую, которая, как казалось, пробиралась в дамки; откуда она взялась, это один только бог знал” (VI, 84; emphasis U.H.). 113 “‘Бейте его!’—кричал он исступленно, обратившись к Порфирию и Павлушке … ‘Бейте его!’—кричал Ноздрев, порываясь вперед … как будто подступал под неприступную крепость. ‘Бейте его!’—кричал он таким же голосом, как во время великого приступа кричит своему взводу: ‘Ребята, вперед!’ какой‑нибудь отчаянный поручик. … ‘Ребята, вперед!’—кричит он, порываясь, не помышляя, что вредит уже обдуманному плану общего приступа, … и что уже свищет роковая пуля, готовясь захлопнуть его крикливую глотку” (VI, 86–87; emphasis U.H.).

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things. In this sense, the game of checkers acquires a theological dimension whose implications are only superficially veiled by the comic nature of the situation: “God knows what might have befallen him; but it pleased the Fates to save the sides, shoulders, and the well-nurtured parts of our hero. In an unexpected fashion there suddenly came, as if from the clouds, the quivering sounds of jingle bells.”114 The local police captain has come to arrest Nozdrev who, it thereby transpires, is harder hit than Chichikov himself—an outcome precisely parallel with the latter’s dismissal from the customs service, where the denouncer suffered more from his act than the denounced.115 True to his impulsive nature, Nozdrev seeks later, in Chapter Ten, to incriminate Chichikov before the town elders, irrespective of the damage he brings down on his own head by depicting himself as an accomplice: To the question: Was it not a fact that the said Chichikov had intended to carry off the Governor’s daughter, and was it not a fact that he, Nozdrev, had himself volunteered to help and participate in this affair? Nozdrev answered: Yes, he did help, and that had it not been for him, Nozdrev, nothing at all would have happened. At this point he did bring himself up short, perceiving that he had lied absolutely without any need and might bring trouble down upon his own head, but by then it was utterly beyond his power to curb his tongue.116 Right to the end, then, Chichikov’s relations with Nozdrev reflect his time as a customs officer. Nozdrev’s unpredictable outbursts parallel the irrationality with which Chichikov’s quarrel with his accomplice in the customs service brings all his criminal plans to nothing. Even the beating he almost received

114 “[Б]ог знает, чего бы ни случилось с ним; но судьбам угодно было спасти бока, плеча и все благовоспитанные части нашего героя. Неожиданным образом звякнули вдруг как с облаков задребезжавшие звуки колокольчика …” (VI, 87; emphasis U.H.). Chichikov shares with Lermontov’s Pechorin both the ambition to plan his own destiny and his ensuing downfall—a parallel that demonstrates the underlying romanticism of Dead Souls (see Walter Rehm, Experimentum Medietatis. Eine Studie zur dichterischen Gestaltung des Unglaubens bei Jean Paul und Dostojewski [Munich: Rinn, 1947], 7–95). 115 See VI, 237. 116 “На вопрос, точно ли Чичиков имел намерение увезти губернаторскую дочку и правда ли, что он сам взялся помогать и участвовать в этом деле, Ноздрев отвечал, что помогал и что если бы не он, то не вышло бы ничего. Тут он и спохватился было, видя, что солгал вовсе напрасно и мог таким образом накликать на себя беду, но языка никак уже не мог придержать” (VI, 208‑209).

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from N ­ ozdrev’s serfs echoes the one planned for him by his fellow customs officer: “it was also said that certain bravoes had been hired to waylay our hero some eventide in a dark by-lane. …”117 And the final flourish set beneath this episode, ­Nozdrev’s arrest, also has its counterpart—albeit not ­immediately— in ­Chichikov’s progress. The balance between chronicle and prehistory is temporarily disturbed inasmuch as the police sanctions touch Nozdrev alone; ­Chichikov goes unscathed. But the balance is at least partially restored in the unexpected interruption of his journey that Chichikov suffers at the beginning of the next chapter. Its complete restoration only occurs when Nozdrev publicly unmasks the dealer in souls and forces him to flee—a situation the narrator duly sets within the dialectic of plan and chance, commenting that the gambler’s appearance at the Governor’s ball confronted Chichikov with “an unpleasant surprise, as nasty as nasty could be.”118

c)  Boundary Transgressions If the vagaries of plan and chance form one bracket round Chichikov’s intermezzo with the customs service and his unscheduled visit to Nozdrev, there is ­another bracket around these events that is best described under the term “boundary transgressions.” This has already been touched on in the general overview, but some added detail is called for. Service at the border is Chichikov’s secret ambition for the simple reason that he hopes to maximize his personal gains there. The terms in which he puts this to himself are revealing: He had noticed what elegant little foreign thingamabobs the Customs clerks acquired, what porcelains and cambrics they sent on to their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. More than once he had said with a sigh: “There’s what one ought to get into: not only is the frontier right near by, but the people are enlightened as well, and what a supply of shirts of fine Holland linen one could put by!” It must be added that, besides this, he was thinking of a particular kind of French soap which imparted 117 “Впрочем, говорят, что … были даже подкуплены люди, чтобы под вечерок в темном переулке поизбить нашего героя” (VI, 237). 118 “А между тем герою нашему готовилась пренеприятнейшая неожиданность» (VI, 171). See also Nozdrev’s last visit to Chichikov: “вдруг отворилась дверь его комнаты и предстал Ноздрев никак не ожиданным образом” (VI, 213; emphasis U.H.).

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an unusual whiteness to the skin and a freshness to the cheeks; God knows just what it was called, exactly, but according to his suppositions, it would infallibly be found at the frontier.119 Significantly, at the end of this episode, when he has, on the most nugatory grounds, chanced—and lost—his entire winnings from the smuggling ring, Chichikov is left, apart from his emergency fund of (after all) ten thousand rubles, with only “two dozen Holland shirts, and a small light carriage, such as bachelors like to drive about in, and two serfs … and … five or six cakes of the soap for preserving the freshness of his cheeks.”120 Viewed in the cold light of day, this inventory—specifically the shirts and soap—coincides exactly with what he had promised himself from the service! It is the sort of mocking outcome we are familiar with from fairytales: the mercilessly literal fulfillment of a wish meant by the wisher only in a general or figurative sense. Disillusioned victims can only curse their carelessness in relations with Fate. Not so Chichikov who, as we have seen, is blind to the workings of nemesis behind his various misfortunes. Refusing to accept the justice of his dismissal from the customs service, he inevitably fails to see the retribution inherent in his encounter with Nozdrev, a figure crafted by the author wholly out of the ruins of Chichikov’s career as a customs officer. Viewed critically, Nozdrev is a human mosaic whose individual pieces precisely reflect what remained to Chichikov after his fall from grace: ten thousand rubles, two serfs, a bachelor’s light carriage, a supply of Holland linen shirts, and some bars of French soap that imparted a singular freshness to the miscreant’s “full [and pleasant—U.H.] cheeks.”121 All these items are associated in equal measure with Nozdrev, whose “full rosy cheeks” and “strawberries-and-cream” c­ omplexion are explicitly dwelt upon by the narrator.122 Whether this is due to the application of a particular soap is not 119 “Он видел, какими щегольскими заграничными вещицами заводились таможенные чиновники, какие фарфоры и батисты пересылали кумушкам, тетушкам и сестрам. Не раз давно уже он говорил со вздохом: ‘Вот бы куда перебраться: и граница близко, и просвещенные люди, а какими тонкими голландскими рубашками можно обзавестись!’ Надобно прибавить, что при этом он подумывал еще об особенном сорте французского мыла, сообщавшего необыкновенную белизну коже и свежесть щекам; как оно называлось, бог ведает, но, по его предположениям, непременно находилось на границе” (VI, 234; emphasis U.H.). 120 “Удержалось у него тысячонок десяток …, да две дюжины голландских рубашек, да небольшая бричка, в какой ездят холостяки, да два крепостных человека …; да таможенные чиновники … оставили ему пять или шесть кусков мыла для сбережения свежести щек” (VI, 237–238; emphasis U.H.). 121 “одна из приятных и полных щек нашего героя” (VI, 86). 122 “Это был среднего роста, очень недурно сложенный молодец с полными румяными

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disclosed, but we do learn that the dog-lover Nozdrev, who so identifies with his animals as to be indistinguishable from them,123 has his favorite dog’s belly washed “with soap three times a day.”124 Moreover, his collector’s passion—also a typical weakness of customs officials—is, to put it mildly, eclectic, extending even to the Holland linen beloved of Chichikov.125 And although he has no carriage of his own, having lost it at cards, Gogol has Nozdrev in Chapter Four arriving in “a light carriage … harnessed with a team of three good horses”126 in which he subsequently leaves, driving “side-by-side” with Chichikov.127 The parallel between their personalities could hardly be expressed more aptly. As for Nozdrev’s marital circumstances, he remains despite his marriage—his wife having died shortly after their wedding—a thoroughly confirmed bachelor (the only one among the five landowners): “Nozdrev, at thirty-five, was absolutely the same as he had been at twenty and at eighteen—a great hand for having a good time. His marriage had not changed him in the least, inasmuch as his wife had soon passed on into another world, leaving two urchins behind her, of whom he had absolutely no need.”128 In contrast with the dealer in souls, who is still climbing the ladder to the estate of landowner, Nozdrev already has a certain retinue: a cook, a nurse, and servants. Only two of the latter are mentioned by name: the same Porfirii and Pavlushka who are commanded toward the end of the episode to assault his importunate guest while the latter’s servants stand impotently by. The only item from the inventory of Chichikov’s disgraced condition that the figure of ­Nozdrev still lacks is, then, the ten thousand rubles, and we do not have to search long in the text to find that piece of the mosaic, too. “[T]en thousand rubles” echoes щеками. … Свеж он был, как кровь с молоком” (VI, 64). See also VI, 70: “Но здоровые и полные щеки его так хорошо были сотворены и вмещали в себе столько растительной силы, что бакенбарды скоро вырастали вновь, еще даже лучше прежних.” On the color of Nozdrev’s cheeks see the following chapter of this study (p. 141). 123 He is said to move among his dogs “just as a father does among his family” (“Ноздрев был среди их совершенно как отец среди семейства”; VI, 73). 124 “Порфирий должен был чистить меделянскому щенку пуп особенной щеточкой и мыть его три раза на день в мыле” (VI, 208). 125 “голландск[ий] холст[]” (VI, 72). Nozdrev also appreciates the porcelain so coveted by customs officials: in his case there is “faience crockery” (“фаянсов[ая] посуд[а],” ibid.). 126 “Взглянувши в окно, увидел он остановившуюся перед трактиром легонькую бричку, запряженную тройкою добрых лощадей” (VI, 63). 127 “Бричка Чичикова ехала рядом с бричкой, в которой сидели Ноздрев и его зять” (VI, 69). 128 “Ноздрев в тридцать пять лет был таков же совершенно, каким был в осьмнадцать и в двадцать: охотник погулять. Женитьба его ничуть не переменила, тем более что жена скоро отправилась на тот свет, оставивши двух ребятишек, которые решительно были ему не нужны” (VI, 70).

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like a refrain on Nozdrev’s lips: it is the sum for which he would sell Chichikov a flea-bitten puppy,129 and that he swears he spent on a bay stallion130 he urges Chichikov to buy. Figuratively speaking, one finds in the figure of Nozdrev not only the entire listed assets of Chichikov’s bankruptcy, but also the very personification of that bankruptcy’s cause: the flagrant abuse of office by one appointed to guard the boundaries of the realm. For Nozdrev, as we have seen, goes one further than his guest in this respect, disregarding the very existence of boundaries of any kind. In this sense Chichikov’s attempted defense against his host’s overly pressing confidentiality—“There are limits to everything”131—is almost pathetic: for Nozdrev, the remark holds even less meaning than it does for Chichikov. Gogol could scarcely demonstrate more clearly that his notorious flouter of limits has here met his master.

d)  Of Sangfroid and Sweat But Chapter Four contains yet another set of hints linking Nozdrev with Chichikov’s sojourn on the frontier. To begin with, the narrator shows a predilection in that episode for one of Nozdrev’s favorite words: okhotnik, a term that can mean both “hunter” and “lover” (in the sense of collector or connoisseur).132 What at first sight may seem a superficial stylistic detail has a deeper sense: both the landowner and the civil servant are okhotniki, hunter-gatherers. Nozdrev’s very name (a play on the Russian word for “nostrils”) suggests that he, the doglover, shares Chichikov’s nose for contraband, of which it is said: “[W]hen it came to searches … his scent was simply as keen as a hound’s.”133 For Nozdrev, too, is credited by the narrator with a “keen scent,”134 while Chichikov sees in him the characteristic bloodhound instinct of the over-zealous customs clerk: “Oh, what an inquisitive fellow! He’d like to lay his hands on any sort of trash— and stick his nose into it as well!”135 129 “Ах, брат, … знаю, что ты теперь не отстанешь, но за десять тысяч не отдам, наперед говорю” (VI, 67). 130 “Прежде всего пошли они обсматривать конюшню, где видели … гнедого жеребца …, за которого Ноздрев божился, что заплатил десять тысяч” (VI, 72, see VI, 79). 131 “‘Всему есть границы’, сказал Чичиков с чувством достоинства” (VI, 79). 132 See Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 36. 133 “у него просто было собачье чутье” (VI, 235). 134 “Чуткой нос его слышал за несколько десятков верст, где была ярмарка” (VI, 70). 135 “Ох, какой любопытный! ему всякую дрянь хотелось бы пощупать рукой, да еще и понюхать!” (VI, 78).

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Chichikov makes a name for himself on the frontier through a combination of diabolical thoroughness and a sangfroid that drives his victims to distraction: [O]ne could not but be amazed at seeing that he had patience enough to tap and finger every tiny button, yet all this was carried through with a lethal sangfroid that was incredibly polite. And while those who were submitting to the search were going mad [besilis′], were beside themselves from rage, and feeling an evil impulse to slap him all over his pleasant countenance, he, without changing either his expression or his polite behavior, would merely add: “May I trouble you to stand up a little, if you’ll be so kind?” … or: “Permit me, I’ll have to make a small rip in the lining of your overcoat with my penknife.” And, as he said this, he’d start pulling shawls and kerchiefs out of there as coolly as if he were pulling them out of his own trunk … so that the poor traveler, after crossing the frontier, still couldn’t come to for several minutes and, as he mopped the sweat that had broken out in beads all over him, could but keep on making the sign of the cross over himself and muttering: “Well, well!”136 Chichikov’s sangfroid comes through again in his quarrel with Nozdrev about the resumption of their game of checkers—a bout whose sole rule, we have seen, was the willfulness of his host: “‘You’ll never make me do that,’ said C ­ hichikov coolly, and, walking up to the board, mixed up the checkers.”137 Such unruffled effrontery also predictably enrages (beshenstv[o], VI, 86) his opponent, and again Chichikov’s “pleasant countenance” is imperiled: “Nozdrev swung his arm back … and there was a very great possibility that one of the full [and pleasant—

136 “[Н]ельзя было не изумиться, видя, как у него доставало столько терпения, чтобы ощупать всякую пуговку, и всё это производилось с убийственным хладнокровием, вежливым до невероятности. И в то время, когда обыскиваемые бесились, выходили из себя и чувствовали злобное побуждение избить щелчками приятную его наружность, он, не изменяясь ни мало ни в лице, ни в вежливых поступках, приговаривал только: ‘Не угодно ли вам будет немножко побеспокоиться и привстать?’ … или: ‘Позвольте, вот я ножичком немного пораспорю подкладку вашей шинели’, и, говоря это, он вытаскивал оттуда шали, платки, хладнокровно, как из собственного сундука. … Так что бедный путешественник, переехавший через границу, всё еще в продолжение нескольких минут не мог опоминться и, отирая пот, выступивший мелкою сыпью по всему телу, только крестился да приговаривал: ‘Ну, ну!’” (VI, 235; emphasis U.H.). 137 “‘Этого ты меня не заставишь сделать’, сказал Чичиков хладнокровно и, подошедши к доске, смешал шашки” (VI, 85).

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U.H.] cheeks of our hero would have been covered with an ignominy that could never be washed out. …”138 The balance of power has reversed, and the cool performer now feels the pressure; “things were really getting hot” (zharko, VI, 85) for him. Accordingly, he breaks out in perspiration: “Eh, how he made me sweat!”139 Chichikov groans, once he has gained safety from the gambler’s rage. In sum, therefore, the assembled details of the Nozdrev chapter and the (temporally) earlier customs episode amount to a simple moral equation: Chichikov suffers at the gambler’s house what his victims suffered at the customs post. He learns by bitter experience not only what it means to ignore boundaries, but also how foolhardy it is to pit reason against the force of destiny. But this, too, in the final analysis is no more than his comeuppance for the hubris with which a mortal dare even think of calculating his own fate.

4. Korobochka In her importance for the composition of Dead Souls, Korobochka is, of all the landowners, the one closest to Nozdrev. In each case, the circumstance of Chichikov’s chance encounter with them and subsequent visit to their estates— against the run of his original plan—already connects them. (Pliushkin’s name is admittedly not on Chichikov’s starting list either, but is immediately set there when Chichikov catches wind of him.) Moreover, it is Nozdrev and Korobochka whose prattling causes Chichikov’s premature flight from the town of N–: Nozdrev paves the way for his fall from public grace and Korobochka seals it. As much as Nozdrev, then, she embodies the central character’s nemesis.

a)  The Birth of the Business Idea out of the Dirt That the old lady is sent him from on high is something of which the reader is left in no doubt. When, after a lengthy and errant journey, Chichikov washes up at Korobochka’s estate, “it seemed as if fate itself had decided to have compassion upon him”140—an impression enhanced by the pitch darkness of the scene, 138 “Ноздрев размахнулся рукой … и очень бы могло статься, что oдна из приятных и полных щек нашего героя покрылась бы несмываемым бесчестием” (VI, 85–86; emphasis U.H.). 139 “Эк, какую баню задал!” (VI, 89). 140 “Но в это время, казалось, как будто сама судьба решилась над ним сжалиться” (VI, 43; emphasis U.H.). The “it seems” in this sentence is not unimportant: Chichikov’s encounter with Korobochka is, in fact, decidedly fateful for him.

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where blind chance holds sway. As already mentioned, Chichikov is tipped by his coachman Selifan “smack into the mud [griaz′],” from which he scrambles, however, into a situation where he can negotiate a deal as unexpected as it is promising. In much the same fashion—and this, too, has been touched upon— he rises out of the “muck [griaz′]” into which the customs affair has thrown him. In the lowly position of a legal agent—“a calling whose followers have not yet won a status among us, being jostled on all sides, poorly respected by petty clerical creatures and even by the principals themselves”141—Chichikov is struck by a transforming insight: There was one commission that came his way among others: to see about mortgaging several hundred serfs in the Tutelary Chamber. … Chichikov, in his role of agent …, explained … the following circumstance: half the serfs had died off. …   “Yes, but they’re listed in the census of the Bureau of Audits, are they not?” asked the secretary.   “They are so listed,” Chichikov told him.   “Well, then, why be so apprehensive?” asked the secretary. “There’s a death and there’s a birth, and each one has a certain worth.” The secretary, obviously, knew how to talk in rhymes. And in the meantime the most inspired idea that ever entered human head descended upon our hero. “Eh, but I am Simple ­Simon himself!” said he to himself. “I’m looking all over for my mittens, and they’re stuck right in my own belt! …”142 The structure of Chichikov’s arrival in Korobochka’s realm is much the same. While he still feels himself pursued by fate—as, after his earlier fall from grace he “was filled with grief, with vexation; he murmured against the whole world; he

141 “звание[], еще не приобретш[ее] у нас гражданства, толкаем[ое] со всех сторон, плохо уважаем[ое] мелкою приказною тварью и даже самими доверителями” (VI, 239). 142 “Из поручений досталось ему, между прочим, одно: похлопотать о заложении в опекунский совет нескольких сот крестьян. … Чичиков в качестве поверенного … объяснил …, что … половина крестьян вымерла. … ‘Да ведь они по ревизской сказке числятся?’—сказал секретарь. ‘Числятся’,—отвечал Чичиков. ‘Ну, так чего же вы оробели?’—сказал секретарь: ‘один умер, другой родится, а всё в дело годится.’ Секретарь, как видно, умел говорить и в рифму. А между тем героя нашего осенила вдохновеннейшая мысль, какая когда‑либо приходила в человеческую голову. ‘Эх я Аким‑простота!’—сказал он сам в себе: ‘ищу рукавиц, а обе за поясом!’” (VI, 239–240).

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was furious against the injustice of fate …”143—at this very moment fate is busy preparing the ground for his next coup. What we on both occasions witness is the birth of a business idea out of the dirt. The parallels between Chichikov’s visit to the elderly landowner and his recovery from the customs debacle extend to stylistic details. Thus, after his dismissal from the service, his self-pity gives rise to the words “I’ve never brought misfortune upon anybody; I’ve never robbed the widow …”144—precisely what he is later accused of, when all the town hears how, in the guise of a romantic robber, he browbeat the widow Korobochka into granting him all her dead souls: “Just imagine this to yourself: a man armed from head to foot appears on the scene, in the style of that great brigand Rinaldo Rinaldini, and demands: ‘Sell me,’ he says, ‘all the souls who have died!’”145

b)  Backwoods Inventory After his abrupt fall from the throne of smuggler king, Chichikov, then, by no means throws in the towel; on the contrary, he nurtures even higher ambitions. We have already caught a glimpse of the relevant passage in connection with Nozdrev; here it is now in full: At this point it might be concluded that after such tempests, tribulations, after such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the grievousness of life, he would retire with his measly ten thousand, which he’d won with his heart’s blood, into the peaceful backwoods of some small district town and there vegetate forever in a chintz dressing gown by the window of a squat little house, settling, of Sundays, the fights that sprang up under his windows among his muzhiks, or, for exercise and fresh air, taking a walk to his henhouse [kuriatnik] to feel with his own hands whether the hen intended for the soup was plump enough, and would thus pass his quiescent yet, after a fashion, not entirely useless old age.   But things did not work out that way.146 143 See above, p. 61. 144 “Несчастным я не сделал никого: я не ограбил вдову” (VI, 238). 145 “Вообразите себе только то, что является вооруженный с ног до головы вроде Ринальда Ринальдина и требует: ‘Продайте’, говорит, ‘все души, которые умерли’” (VI, 183). 146 “Теперь можно бы заключить, что после таких бурь, испытаний, превратностей судьбы и жизненного горя он удалится с оставшимися кровными десятью тысячонками

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

Gogol took up several elements of this digression–so inconspicuously that it is easy to overlook them—in his depiction of Chichikov’s arrival at Korobochka’s estate. And he set them in almost the same order as in the passage just cited: tempests, fortune’s vagaries, chintz, window, cottage, henhouse. In isolation these items make little sense, but in the flow of the narrative they weave connections between past and present, between Chichikov’s prehistory and the widow’s house. What there was mere image is here reality. The “tempest” that raged metaphorically around the dismissed official bears down with the full force of wind and weather on his carriage as Chichikov loses his way on the road to Korobochka’s; and fortune’s vagaries (prevratnost[i] sud′by, lit. “turnings of fate”) are dramatically enacted by the coachman Selifan, who turns the carriage until it actually capsizes. Three times Gogol repeats the verb: “Thereupon he began to turn the carriage a little, and kept on turning and turning it, until at last he had turned it over entirely on its side. Chichikov went smack into the mud on his hands and knees. … But at this juncture it seemed as if fate itself had decided to have compassion upon him. …”147 The “peaceful backwoods” of the digression materialize for the stranded traveler at the widow’s house, where, although not lent a “chintz dressing gown,” he enjoys the same material in the form of a chintz comforter for his bed.148 And, next morning, we find him standing at the “window” of a “small house”149 looking into the “poultry yard [kuriatnik].”150 With an author of Gogol’s rank, such convergencies cannot be dismissed as mere chance, let alone as the result of a barren, repetitively inclined imagination; and as if to underline this, the same technique recurs only a page later in the next digression: As we already know, Chichikov was mightily solicitous about his descendants. What a touching subject! Here and there, в какое‑нибудь мирное захолустье уездного городишка и там заклёкнет навеки в ситцевом халате у окна низенького домика, разбирая по воскресным дням драку мужиков, возникшую пред окнами, или для освежения пройдясь в курятник пощупать лично курицу, назначенную в суп, и проведет таким образом нешумный, но в своем роде тоже небесполезный век. Но так не случилось … Он был в горе, в досаде, роптал на весь свет, сердился на несправедливость судьбы …, однако же, не мог отказаться от новых попыток.” (VI, 238, emphasis U.H.; see above, p. 61). 147 “Засим начал он слегка поворачивать бричку, поворачивал, поворачивал и наконец выворотил ее совершенно на бок. Чичиков и руками и ногами шлепнулся в грязь. … Но в это время, казалось, как будто сама судьба решилась над ним сжалиться” (VI, 42–43, emphasis U.H.). 148 “ситцев[ое] одеял[о]” (VI, 47). 149 “Бричка, въехавши на двор, остановилась перед небольшим домиком” (VI, 44). 150 “Подошедши к окну, он начал рассматривать бывшие перед ним виды: окно глядело едва ли не в курятник” (VI, 48).

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perchance, one could come upon a man who perhaps mightn’t plunge his arm quite so far into the grab bag were it not for the question which, no one knows why, bobs up of itself: “But what will my children say?” And so the future founder of a line, like a cautious tomcat, looking out of the corner of only one of his eyes to see if the master isn’t watching from somewhere, hastily grabs at anything that’s nearest him, whether it happens to be a piece of butter [maslo], or tallow candles, or lard, or a canary—in a word, whatever he can put his paws on; he won’t let anything get by him.151 The corresponding passage, at the end of the visit, has Korobochka regaling her guest with the products of her kitchen and expounding on her manifold wares: As he was finishing his writing, he sniffed the air slightly and caught the enticing aroma of something hot, made with butter.   “I beg of you to have a bite,” said his hostess. … “And won’t you have some pancakes?”   In answer to this Chichikov rolled up three of the pancakes together and, having dipped them in melted butter, dispatched them into his mouth, after which he had to wipe his lips and hands with a napkin. Having gone through this performance about three times, he asked his hostess to order his carriage harnessed. …   “Well, then … don’t forget me when it comes to filling those contracts.”   “I won’t, I won’t, Chichikov kept saying, stepping out into the entry.   “And aren’t you buying any hog fat?” asked the mistress of the house, following him out.   “And why not? I do buy it, only that will have to come later.”   “I’ll have hog fat, too, around the Christmas holidays.” 151 “Уже известно, что Чичиков сильно заботился о своих потомках. Такой чувствительный предмет! Иной, может быть, и не так бы глубоко запустил руку, если бы не вопрос, который, неизвестно почему, приходит сам собою: а что скажут дети? И вот будущий родоначальник, как осторожный кот, покося только одним глазом вбок, не глядит ли откуда хозяин, хватает поспешно всё, что к нему поближе: масло ли стоит, свечи ли, сало, канарейка ли попалась под лапу,—словом, не пропускает ничего” (VI, 238–239, ­emphasis U.H.).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

  “We’ll buy, we’ll buy, we’ll buy everything, and we’ll buy hog fat as well.”   “Maybe you’ll be needing feathers. I’ll be having feathers, too, about St. Philip’s Fast.152–153 Again Chichikov is offered in concreto what he had been waiting to pounce on in the metaphorical guise of the tomcat: butter, lard (or hog-fat, the same word, salo, is used for both), and what is left of a canary after an encounter with a cat. Only one item from the tomcat’s menu is not on Korobochka’s list: “tallow candles.” Are we to think, then, that Gogol has allowed a thread of his great tapestry to slip from his fingers?—Not at all, for a candle, specifically a “tallow candle,” burns in Chapter Eight in Chichikov’s hotel room, where he is passing a sleepless night after the scandal at the Governor’s ball; and here, too, the widow ­Korobochka is not far away: But while Chichikov was sitting in his uneasy chair, troubled by his thoughts and sleeplessness … and before him warmly glowed a tallow candle, the wick of which had long since become covered with candle snuff as if with a black cowl and was threatening to go out at any moment, and sightless, black night was peering in at the windows …—at this time, in another quarter of the town, an event was taking place that was about to augment the ­unpleasantness of our hero’s position.154

152 St. Philip’s Fast is the forty-day fast in the Eastern Churches from the feast of St. Philip (November 14) through the Epiphany. 153 “Оканчивая писать, он потянул несколько к себе носом воздух и услышал завлекательный запах чего-то горячего в масле. … ‘А блинков?’—сказала хозяйка. В ответ на это Чичиков свернул три блина вместе и, обмакнувши их в растопленное масло, отправил в рот, а губы и руки вытер салфеткой. Повторивши это раза три, он попросил хозяйку приказать заложить его бричку. … ‘Так уж пожалуйста, не позабудьте насчет подрядов.’—‘Не забуду, не забуду’, говорил Чичиков, выходя в сени. ‘А свиного сала не покупаете?’—сказала хозяйка, следуя за ним. ‘Почему не покупать? Покупаю, только после.’—‘У меня о святках и свиное сало будет.’—‘Купим, купим, всего купим, и свиного сала купим.’—‘Может быть, понадобится еще птичьих перьев. У меня к Филиппову посту будут и птичьи перья’” (VI, 56–57, emphasis U.H.). 154 “Но в продолжение того, как он сидел в жестких своих креслах, тревожимый мыслями и бессонницей, … и перед ним теплилась сальная свечка, которой светильня давно уже накрылась нагоревшею черною шапкою, ежеминутно грозя погаснуть, и глядела ему в окна слепая, темная ночь, …—в это время на другом конце города происходило событие, которое готовилось увеличить неприятность положения нашего героя” (VI, 176).

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The event in question is the arrival of Korobochka in the town: the same who once appeared to Chichikov—tormented as he was on that occasion, too, with sleeplessness155—as a light in the blind darkness of the night.156

c)  Chichikov Undressed This whole play of stylistic echoes between prehistory and chronicle is, however, no more than an ornamental accessory to the actual overarching structure linking Chichikov’s stroke of economic genius with Korobochka: the elderly widow is, of all the landowners, the most perfect replica of his own wheeler-dealer nature. As already observed, everything in her world serves her as potentially tradable goods,157 be it honey, hemp, hog fat, feathers, buckwheat, or rye flour, groats, cattle, wenches,158 or even corpses—for she asks Chichikov, in all seriousness, if he intends to dig up159 the dead souls, an enterprise that would doubtless have astonished her less than the fictive deal he was offering her. She is quite open about employing money to curry favor with the local officials, and indirectly reveals that she had initially planned to buy her guest, too, asking him baldly “Why, you must be a tax assessor, I guess?” only to tell him without demur how she had recently “greased the Assessor’s palm.”160 Price, for Korobochka, is the only valid category for anything, and in that respect her soul is indeed akin to Chichikov’s—a man whose mind runs to describing an attractive girl as “a most dainty tidbit” only when he thinks in the same moment of her dowry.161 On several occasions Gogol underlines the almost intimate closeness between the two personae. An aunt of Chichikov’s has the same given name and patronymic as Korobochka;162 they use the familiar forms of address matushka and batiushka (VI, 50); and the guest is offered a tenderness by his hostess that only the deceased master of the house enjoyed: to have his heels scratched before retiring for the night.163 Above all, however, Gogol grants Korobochka two 155 See VI, 49, 177. 156 “Свет мелькнул в одном окошке” (VI, 43). 157 See Hans Günther, Das Groteske bei N. V. Gogol’ (Formen und Funktionen) (Munich: Sagner, 1968), 199. 158 See VI, 50, 57, 55, 52. 159 “Нешто хочешь ты их откапывать из земли?” (VI, 51). 160 See VI, 50, 52: “Ведь вы, я чай, заседатель?”—“Еще третью неделю взнесла больше полутораста, да заседателя подмаслила”. 161 “Ведь если, положим, этой девушке да придать тысячонок двести приданого, из нее бы мог выдти очень, очень лакомый кусочек” (VI, 93). 162 “Nastasya Petrovna” (VI, 50). See Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 76–77. 163 “Может, ты привык, отец мой, чтобы кто‑нибудь почесал на ночь пятки. Покойник мой без этого никак не засыпал” (VI, 47).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

privileges that single her out from all the other characters in the novel. First, she alone is granted a glimpse—justified by her very name, for korobochka means “box”164—into Chichikov’s traveling chest, the privacy of whose contents rivals that of the Holy Grail; and the “correspondence between the geometry of a box and the psychology of the hidden” needs, as Gaston Bachelard has observed, “no lengthy commentary.”165 Secondly, she is the only person to see Chichikov naked—a striking detail in a nineteenth-century Russian novel.166 Nor is this all, for the moment in which his hostess’s eye “knows him in the flesh” is marked by the striking of a wall clock—it is ten a.m.—but of no ordinary clock, for this one emits a “hissing sound,” which already at the head of the chapter has been likened to that of a nest of serpents.167 Moreover, when Chichikov, after his sudden unveiling, hastily throws on his clothes and looks out of the window, he sees “[a]pple trees and other fruit trees” scattered over the garden.168 In his classic mise en scène of the Fall Gogol omits no motif, spares no effort to deck out his Korobochka as the virtual Eve, bride of his “traveling salesman from Hades.”169

d)  Poetic Misdemeanor The quasi-conjugal relationship between Chichikov and Korobochka is confirmed in the context of his “genial insight” in Chapter Eleven, for he owes his business idea, as we have seen, to a secretary, and Korobochka, for her part, ­introduces herself as the “widow of a collegiate secretary.”170 Moreover, her soon-to-be guest is led to her estate by the acumen of his horses, which, berated by the drunken Selifan as “secretaries,”171 find their way through the inclement night. The secretary’s rhyme “There’s a death and there’s a birth, and each one has a certain worth” might even be justly inscribed as a motto above the door of a widow who deals so indiscriminately in the living and dead, for we have also 164 VI, 56. Andrei Bely already pointed to the onomastic relation between Korobochka (“Mrs. Box”) and Chichikov’s chest. Gudrun Langer, “Pandoras Töchter. Überlegungen zur Kon­zeption des ‘schönen Übels’ (‘kalòn kakón’) im Werk Gogol’s,” Specimina Philologiae Slavicae 117: Slavische Sprachwissenschaft und Interdisziplinarität, no. 4 (1998): 147–161 ­interprets her as a Pandora’s Box (see note 54 on p. 132). 165 Gaston Bachelard, Poetik des Raumes, trans. Kurt Leonhard (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1987), 97. 166 See VI, 46–47. See Felix Philipp Ingold, “Russischer Eros,” Sinn und Form 45 (1993): 780–790. 167 Compare VI, 47 with VI, 45: “шум очень походил на то, как бы вся комната наполнилась змеями”. 168 “По огороду были разбросаны кое‑где яблони и другие фруктовые деревья” (VI, 48). 169 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 73. 170 “Коробочка, коллежская секретарша” (VI, 50). 171 “Таким образом дошло до того, что он начал называть их наконец секретарями” (VI, 42).

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seen (in the context of Gogol’s ground plan) how Korobochka wonders if the dead, too, might perhaps “come in handy around the place somehow.”172 Between the lines, however, an even finer thread links the secretary’s rhyme and Chichikov’s inspiration with the Korobochka episode, namely the literary quality of all three elements: Chichikov picks up the secretary’s couplet and spins it out into the fiction of an estate in the province of Kherson, while Korobochka’s realm bears all the marks of a fable. The account of Chichikov’s transformation into a trader in souls plays on the workings of the creative imagination in more than one dimension: The secretary, obviously, knew how to talk in rhymes. And in the meantime the most inspired idea that ever entered human head descended upon our hero. … Why, were I to buy all these souls that have died, now, before the figures for a new census are submitted. … True enough, one can neither buy nor mortgage serfs unless one has land. But then I’ll buy them for resettlement—for resettlement, that’s it! Tracts of land are now being given away, free and for the asking, in the provinces of Tauris and Kherson, just so you settle there. And that’s precisely where I’ll resettle all my dead souls! To the province of Kherson with them! …   And that is how this strange plot was formed in the head of our hero, for which plot I hardly know if the readers will be grateful to him; but as for how grateful the author is, that would be hard even to express, for no matter what one says, if this matter had not come into Chichikov’s head, this epic [poema] would never have seen the light of day.173 172 “А может, в хозяйстве‑то как‑нибудь под случай понадобятся” (VI, 53). Another striking detail is that, before setting out on his procurement mission, Chichikov “ma[kes] the sign of the cross over himself, after the Russian wont” (“Перекрестясь по русскому обычаю”; VI, 240), which is exactly what Korobochka does when he makes her his offer: “‘The power of the cross be with us! What dreadful things you’re saying!’ the old woman let drop, crossing herself ” (“‘С нами крестная сила! Какие ты страсти говоришь!’—проговорила старуха, крестясь”; VI, 54; emphasis U.H.). 173 “Секретарь, как видно, умел говорить и в рифму. А между тем героя нашего осенила вдохновеннейшая мысль, какая когда‑либо приходила в человеческую голову. … Да накупи я всех этих, которые вымерли, пока еще не подавали новых ревизских сказок …! Правда, без земли нельзя ни купить, ни заложить. Да ведь я куплю на вывод, на вывод; теперь земли в Таврической и Херсонской груберниях отдаются даром, только заселяй. Туда я их всех и переселю! в Херсонскую их! … И вот таким образом составился в голове нашего героя сей странный сюжет, за который, не знаю, будут ли благодарны ему читатели, а уж как благодарен автор, так и выразить трудно. Ибо, что ни говори, не приди

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

Korobochka’s estate is evidently located in a no-man’s-land as insubstantial as Chichikov’s wishful acres, for when he, on the way to Manilov’s, inquires of two muzhiks where “Zamanilovka” (that is, the village behind Manilovka) might lie, he is told not just that they have never heard of such a place, but that it cannot even exist: That will be your road to Manilovka; as for Zamanilovka, there ain’t no such place whatsoever. That’s what it’s called—it goes by the name of Manilovka, that is; but there ain’t no Zamanilovka hereabouts at all. When you get there, you’ll see a house up on a hill. … And that there is your Manilovka; but as for Zamanilovka, there ain’t no such place whatsoever hereabouts, nor ever has been.174 Conversely, Korobochka—whose village lies, in fact, immediately after ­Manilovka175 on Chichikov’s route—has never heard of her neighbor: “Do you know Manilov at least?” asked Chichikov. “And who might Manilov be?” “A landowner, mother.” “No, I never happened to hear of him; there isn’t any such ­landowner.” 176 At this juncture we can scarcely doubt Manilov’s epic reality, so the alternative, to doubt Korobochka’s, is alluring. But that raises the question: What is her ontological status in the novel? To this issue we shall return in the discussion on “truth and lies” that opens Part Two of this study. To summarize: Unique among the landowners by virtue of her sex, Korobochka confronts Chichikov on two levels with himself. First, the term “acquirer,” into which the narrator distills his essence, applies with equal force to her177— в голову Чичикова эта мысль, не явилась бы на свет сия поэма” (VI, 239–240; emphasis U.H.). The importance Gogol attached to calling his work a poema (translated by Guerney here as “epic”) can be seen from the prominence he gave this word on the title page of the first edition of Dead Souls, which he designed himself (see the frontispiece of this study). 174 “Это будет тебе дорога в Маниловку; а Заманиловки никакой нет. Она зовется так, то‑есть ее прозвание Маниловка, а Заманиловки тут вовсе нет. Там прямо на горе увидишь дом. … Вот это тебе и есть Маниловка, а Заманиловки совсем нет никакой здесь, и не было” (VI, 22). 175 Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 57, proposes another, equally plausible, reading of the name Zamanilovka, to which we shall return in the next chapter. 176 “‘По крайней мере, знаете Манилова?’—сказал Чичиков. ‘А кто таков Манилов?’— ‘Помещик, матушка.’—‘Нет, не слыхивала, нет такого помещика’” (VI, 46). 177 “Справедливее всего назвать его: хозяин, приобретатель. Приобретение— вина его” (VI, 241–242). Korobochka could also be reduced to the analogous:

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hence her depiction as spouse, the embodiment in female form of a core feature of his being. Moreover, many hidden analogies connect her with the decisive, inspiring moment of the “Dead Souls” project. In her Chichikov encounters his muse and his nemesis.

Figure 6. Beginning of Chapter II of Dead Souls (Gogol’s transcript)

“хозяйка‑приобретательница” (see Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 373). In his memoirs, L. I. Arnoldi describes Gogol himself as possessing a “passion for acquisition,” which he also connects with Chichikov. In this light, he argues, Gogol’s resounding proclamation of Thomas à Kempis’s maxim that one should not set one’s heart on transitory things would seem, above all, autotherapeutic. This conclusion can also be ascribed to the function of Chichikov for his creator (See Arnoldi’s memoir “Moe znakomstvo s Gogolem,” in S. I. Mashinskii, ed., Gogol′ v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1952], 472–498, here 482).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

Figure 7. Seven deadly sins in combat with their contrary virtues (late eighteenth-century Russian image)

5. Manilov The concluding pages of Chichikov’s prehistory add little in the way of biographical details. The only really new aspect they reveal is Chichikov’s resolve, if possible, to acquire the dead souls “through friendship rather than by purchase,”178 an intention Gogol associates—as already mentioned in the context of the ground plan of Dead Souls—with Manilov’s sentimentalist cult of friendship. The author wastes no time in unmasking that pose as disguising a self-concern, which

178 See p. 38 above.

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lacks the energy to assert itself in the real world and takes refuge in indolent daydreaming. Manilov, we are told, having taken leave of his guest, remained standing on the front staircase for a long time. … He was thinking of the felicity of a life of friendship, of how fine it would be to dwell with one’s friend on the bank of some river or other, after which his imagination began building a bridge across this river, then a most enormous house, with so lofty a cupola that one might see [unexpectedly enough, St. P ­ etersburg179 and] even Moscow from it, and he also thought how fine it would be to quaff tea there of evenings out in the open air and to discourse on pleasant subjects of one kind or another; after that he imagined that he and Chichikov had arrived in fine carriages at some social affair, where they were enchanting all and sundry with the affability of their behavior; next, the Sovereign, apparently having learned of so great a friendship as theirs, had elevated them to the rank of generals, and, after that, in the very end, his daydreams were of God knows what—things that he himself could make neither head nor tail of, no matter how hard he tried.180 In the original Russian phrase “felicity of a life of friendship” (blagopoluchie druzheskoi zhizni), the word for “felicity” can also be read as “­affluence,” suggesting the real undertone of Manilov’s dreams. That—as a reflection on career advancement in Tsarist Russia—a friendship consisting largely of tea-drinking could be suggested as a basis for promotion to the rank of general needs no comment. The censors understood the reference well enough

179 This detail, absent from the printed version of Dead Souls, is found in Gogol’s manuscript. It is restored here in view of Manilov’s insistence that his sons should learn to value the old and new Russian capitals equally (VI, 30). Gogol may have deleted “St. Petersburg” because he did not want to draw the attention of the censor already at this point to his mention of the tsar a few lines later (see note 181 on p. 85). 180 “Он думал о благополучии дружеской жизни, о том, как бы хорошо было жить с другом на берегу какой‑нибудь реки, потом чрез эту реку начал строиться у него мост, потом огромнейший дом с таким высоким бельведером, что можно оттуда видеть даже Москву, и там пить вечером чай на открытом воздухе и рассуждать о каких‑нибудь приятных предметах.—Потом, что они вместе с Чичиковым приехали в какое‑то общество, в хороших каретах, где обворожают всех приятностию обращения, и что будто бы государь, узнавши о такой их дружбе, пожаловал их генералами, и далее наконец бог знает что такое, чего уже он и сам никак не мог разобрать” (VI, 38–39).

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and insisted that the author replace the word “Sovereign” with “higher authorities.”181

a)  Apologia of Insignificance Behind this passage, however, lies more than a satirical dig at the nepotism rife under Nicholas I. Manilov’s wandering thoughts read like a parody of his creator’s favorite literary technique, the digression. The difference is that while ­Gogol can hold a dozen threads in the air without losing sight of his artistic goal,182 Manilov becomes so tangled in his reveries that “he himself could make neither head nor tail of [them], no matter how hard he tried.” What is striking in this connection is that immediately after the brief biographical note in the concluding chapter hinging Chichikov’s prehistory and the Manilov episode, the narrator launches into a series of digressions. From a defense of his “hero,” who, he admits, might cut a poor figure in a heroic epic,183 he moves first to an excursus on arriving in an unknown town, then to a theory of human passions, from this to a parable of estate management, and finally to the tale of a certain Kifa Mokievich, whose life “in a remote little nook of Russia”184 is spent contemplating the meaning of the world. Here, if not before, one might think the narrator’s fantasy had run right away with him; but the opposite is the case. In reality his imagination is set firmly on a path laid down in the opening pages of Dead Souls, a path he follows step by ­considered step. The first of these digressions refers clearly to the beginning of the novel: For our part, if we should really incur censure for the lack of color in, and the unprepossessing nature of, our personae and characters, we shall merely say that one can never see in the

181 See commentary to VI, 713: Instead of “будто бы государь … пожаловал” the printed version has: “само высшее начальство пожаловало”. 182 Of more recent authors, Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” has pointed up the functional significance of digressions for the overall structure of Dead Souls. 183 On the relation of this genre to Dead Souls, see most recently Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 363ff., Christian von Tschilschke, Epen des Trivialen. N. V. Gogols “Die toten Seelen” und G. Flauberts “Bouvard und Pécuchet”. Ein struktureller und thematischer Vergleich (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), 19–24, and Susi K. Frank, “Pathos und Leidenschaften in Gogol’s ‘Die Toten Seelen,’” in Leidenschaften literarisch, ed. Reingard M. Nischik (Konstanz: UniversitätsVerlag Konstanz, 1998), 205. 184 “в одном отдаленном уголке России” (VI, 243).

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beginning all the wide current and scope of any matter. Entering any town, even though it be a capital, is always a bleak affair; at first everything is drab and monotonous: one comes upon factories and workshops without number, all blackened with smoke, and only thereafter will one glimpse the angles of six-story houses, and shops, and signs, and streets with tremendous perspectives consisting entirely of belfries, columns, statues, towers, with all of a city’s glitter, din, and thunder, and everything that the hand and mind of man have brought forth for man to wonder at.185 The scene this passage immediately recalls is Chichikov’s arrival in the town of N–, whose plainness is amply celebrated in Chapter One. But closer scrutiny awakens further echoes of Chichikov’s journey to Manilov’s estate at the beginning of Chapter Two. In both cases the sequence of images is positively filmic: Hardly had the town retreated when (quite the usual thing among us) there unrolled on both sides of the road vistas of a wild preposterousness: hummocks; fir groves; small, squat, sparse undergrowths of young pines; charred stumps of old ones; wild heather; and suchlike nonsensical rubbish. One came upon villages all strung out in a single line, with huts that looked like weather-beaten woodpiles covered over with gray roofs, the wooden fretwork decorations underneath them resembling hanging towels with embroidered designs.186

185 “С нашей стороны, если, уж точно, падет обвинение за бледность и невзрачность лиц и характеров, скажем только то, что никогда вначале не видно всего широкого теченья и объема дела. Въезд в какой бы ни было город, хоть даже в столицу, всегда как-то бледен, сначала всё серо и однообразно: тянутся бесконечные заводы да фабрики, закопченные дымом, а потом уже выглянут углы шестиэтажных домов, магазины, вывески, громадные перспективы улиц, все в колокольнях, колоннах, статуях, башнях, с городским блеском, шумом и громом и всем, что на диво произвела рука и мысль человека” (VI, 241). 186 “Едва только ушел назад город, как уже пошли писать по нашему обычаю чушь и дичь по обеим сторонам дороги: кочки, ельник, низенькие жидкие кусты молодых сосен, обгорелые стволы старых, дикой вереск и тому подобный вздор. Попадались вытянутые по шнурку деревни, постройкою похожие на старые складенные дрова, покрытые серыми крышами с резными деревянными под ними украшениями в виде висячих, шитых узорами утиральников” (VI, 21).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

b)  Theory of the Passions The second excursus also has its counterpart in the Manilov chapter: here, as there, the narrator reflects on the manifold and various nature of the human passions. A comparison of the two passages shows how closely—indeed causally— they are linked. In Chapter Eleven we read: And more than once, some passion—not merely some sweeping, grand longing, but a mean, sneaky yen for something ­insignificant—has developed in a man born for great deeds, making him forget great and sacred obligations and see something great and sacred in insignificant gewgaws. As countless as the sands of the sea are the passions of man, and no one of them resembles another, and all of them, the base and the splendidly beautiful, are in the beginning submissive to the will of man and only later on become fearful tyrants dominating him.187 Manilov, for his part, is introduced in the following terms: Every man has his own enthusiasm: one’s enthusiasm is turned to wolfhounds; to another it seems that he is a great lover of music and amazingly sensitive to all its profound passages; a third may be a great hand at putting away a huge dinner; a fourth feels that he can play a better part in this world, even though that part may be only a fraction above the one assigned to him; a fifth fellow, whose aspiration is more circumscribed, sleeps and dreams of how he might promenade on a gala occasion with some aidede-camp, showing off before his friends, his acquaintances, and even those who aren’t acquainted with him; a sixth may be gifted with a hand that feels a preternatural urge to bet big on an ace or deuce of diamonds, say; while the hand of a seventh simply 187 “И не раз не только широкая страсть, но ничтожная страстишка к чему-нибудь мелкому разрасталась в рожденном на лучшие подвиги, заставляла его позабывать великие и святые обязанности и в ничтожных побрякушках видеть великое и святое. Бесчисленны, как морские пески, человеческие страсти, и все не похожи одна на другую, и все они, низкие и прекрасные, все вначале покорны человеку и потом уже становятся страшными властелинами его” (VI, 242). On the particular danger of small temptations for one’s salvation see also Thomas à Kempis, Nachfolge Christi, bk. 3, chap. 20. On the literary history of the theme of the passions see Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 363.

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itches to set things to rights wherever he may happen to be, to get under the skin of a stationmaster or of a coachman. In short, everyone has something all his own, but Manilov didn’t have a thing. 188 At first sight, Manilov seems to be simply excepted from the catalogue of the seven enthusiasms—Gogol’s trivialization of the Seven Deadly Sins. But a few lines later we are told, as if en passant, that he did have something—pipe s­ moking—“a habit he had formed at the time he had served in the army, where he had been considered the most modest, the most considerate, and the best educated of officers.”189 That this was no mere habit but a real passion becomes clear when Gogol allows the reader a glance into the landowner’s “den”: … there was more of tobacco there than of anything else. It was there in all shapes and forms: in paper boxes, in a tobacco jar, and, finally, simply strewn in a heap on the table. Also, lying upon both windowsills were little mounds of ashes knocked out of pipes and so disposed, not without pains, as to achieve very handsome little rows. It was obvious that, on occasion, this must have constituted a pastime for the master of the house.190 Manilov even tells of a lieutenant in his regiment “who never let a pipe out of his mouth, not only at table, but even, if I may be permitted to say it, in all other places.”191 With carefully calculated brushstrokes, Gogol fills in bit by bit the 188 “У всякого есть свой задор: у одного задор обратился на борзых собак; другому кажется, что он сильный любитель музыки и удивительно чувствует все глубокие места в ней; третий мастер лихо пообедать; четвертый сыграть роль хоть одним вершком повыше той, которая ему назначена; пятый, с желанием более ограниченным, спит и грезит о том, как бы пройтиться на гуляньи с флигель-адъютантом, напоказ своим приятелям, знакомым и даже незнакомым; шестой уже одарен такою рукою, которая чувствует желание сверхъестественное заломить угол какому‑нибудь бубновому тузу или двойке, тогда как рука седьмого так и лезет произвести где‑нибудь порядок, подобраться поближе к личности станционного смотрителя или ямщиков,—словом, у всякого есть свое, но у Манилова ничего не было” (VI, 24). 189 “курить [трубку] сделал привычку, когда еще служил в армии, где считался скромней­ шим, деликатнейшим и образованнейшим офицером” (VI, 25). 190 “[Н]о больше всего было табаку. Он был в разных видах: в картузах и в табашнице, и наконец насыпан был просто кучею на столе. На обоих окнах тоже помещены были горки быбитой из трубки золы, расставленные не без старания очень красивыми рядками. Заметно было, что это иногда доставляло хозяину препровождение времени” (VI, 32). 191 “В нашем полку был поручик …, который не выпускал изо рта трубки не только за столом, но даже, с позволения сказать, во всех прочих местах” (VI, 32).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

portrait of the allegedly impalpable Manilov as a nicotine-pickled addict, a concrete illustration of what toward the end of the book he will invoke abstractly as a main peril for humankind—the former officer of exemplary virtue who spends his time lining up heaps of ashes from his pipe, a “man born for great deeds,” reduced to seeing “something great … in insignificant gewgaws.”192 ­Gogol’s subtly delayed narration acquaints us already in its second chapter with the signs of a process whose result is only revealed in the eleventh193—a technique of twofold interest, for it illustrates both the author’s theory of sin and the way in which that theory is embodied in literature. Manilov exemplifies an axiom of Gogol’s ethics; the author’s artistry lies in creating the illusion of a realistically drawn figure. Even what is perhaps the most vivid facet of the Manilov chapter, the portrayal of the master’s two young sons, resolves on closer scrutiny into a mere arabesque constructed around the moral message of the final chapter. For the realization that one called to “great things” (podvigi, “heroic deeds”) can lose himself in “insignificant gewgaws” is borne up not only by Manilov’s predilection for the manly attribute of the tobacco pipe, but also by his attitude to his children. ­Judging from their names, the two boys are intended for a heroic career: Alcides is a cognomen of Heracles, and Themistoclius (a corruption of ‘Themistocles,’ the victor of Salamis) was in Gogol’s original manuscript actually called Menelaus.194 That the two boys, unlike their father, are as active as children can be in the pursuit of warfare becomes evident at the dinner table, when Themistoclius bites Alcides’s ear195 and when they are later pictured playing with a “little wooden husar, who … lacked both his arms and his nose.”196 Chichikov then exacerbates matters by promising, as a parting gift, to extend the children’s arsenal: “Good-bye, my darling little ones! … [W]hen I come, I’ll bring you something, without fail. For you, Themistoclius, I’ll bring a sword. Do you want a sword?” 192 See especially the chapter on Manilov in Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 52–69. 193 The process is reflected in Gogol’s choice of terms for “passion”: a gradation leading from strast′ via the diminutive strastishka down to zador. This largely suppresses the associative link between the two meanings of the English word “passion” (“suffering” and “desire”), which otherwise exists in Russian, as it does in Greek, French, and German (see Elena S. Koporskaia, Semanticheskaia istoriia slavianizmov v russkom literaturnom iazyke novogo vremeni [Moscow: Nauka, 1988], 204). 194 See commentary to VI, 707. Alcides was originally to be called Alcibiades. 195 See VI, 31. 196 “занимались каким‑то деревянным гусаром, у которого уже не было ни руки, ни носа” (VI, 38).

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  “I do,” answered Themistoclius.   “And for you a drum. A drum for you, eh?” Chichikov went on, bending toward Alcides.   “Yeth, a trum,” Alcides lisped in a whisper with his head bent down.   “Very well, I’ll bring you a drum, and what a glorious drum! It will always be beating boom-boom! Boom-boom-bang! …”197 Sword and drum, the classic attributes of the warrior reduced to the rank of children’s toys—the infantilizing of the heroic is pursued in the Manilov episode with vigor. That this is part of a more systematic plan becomes clear, however, only when we come to the digressions of the novel’s closing pages—where, incidentally, the word for hero (geroi) occurs with remarkable frequency, and where the “insignificant gewgaws” lamented by the narrator as the stumbling block of so many ambitions are called in the original nichtozhny[e] pobriakushk[i]: “worthless clattering things.”

c)  Parable of the Insouciant Landowner Having defended himself in the final chapter against the charge that characters endowed with lowly passions make poor subjects for a heroic epic, the narrator is beset by a new concern: But it is not the fact that my readers will be dissatisfied with my hero which is heavy to bear; what is so heavy to bear is that there dwells within my soul an irresistible conviction that the readers might have been satisfied with that self-same hero, with that self-same Chichikov. Had the author not peered quite so deeply into his soul, had he not stirred at the bottom thereof that which glides away and hides from the light, had he not revealed his most secret thoughts, such as no man will confide to another, but shown him as he appeared to the whole town, to Manilov and all the other people, why, all my readers would have been 197 “‘Прощайте, мои крошки. … [К]ак приеду, непременно привезу [вам гостинца]. Тебе привезу саблю; хочешь саблю?’—‘Хочу’,—отвечал Фемистоклюс. ‘А тебе барабан; не правда ли, тебе барабан?’—продолжал он, наклонившись к Алкиду. ‘Парапан’,—отвечал шопотом и потупив голову Алкид. ‘Хорошо, я тебе привезу барабан. Такой славный барабан! … Этак всё будет: туррр … ру … тра‑та‑та, та‑та‑та …’” (VI, 38).

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downright pleased and would have accepted him as an interesting fellow. … Yes, my good readers, you would rather not see mankind’s poverty exposed. “Why all this?” you say. “What does it all lead to? … It would be better, then, to represent for us that which is splendidly beautiful, enticing. Better let us forget ourselves for a while!”198 Not by chance, Manilov alone among the landowners is mentioned here by name, for he of all people embodies in purest form the social code of decorum, of closing one’s eyes to all unpleasantness. The condition of euphemism as a categorical imperative will occupy our attention again in the chapter “On Truth and Lies in a Moral Sense”; before we get there, however, we should listen again to the narrator, who responds to the wishes of his imaginary reader with a parable: “Brother,” says the landowner to his steward, “why do you tell me that things are going abominably with my estate? Brother, I know that without you; why haven’t you got anything else to talk about, now? You just give me a chance to forget all this, not to be aware of it, then I’ll be happy.”199 This attitude, too is exemplified nowhere so perfectly as by the Manilovs, of whom we soon learn that “[i]n a word, they were what is called happy.”200 A few pages later Chichikov’s mission occasions a dialogue between the landowner and his steward from which we learn the basis of that happiness. To speak with Nietzsche, it rests firmly “on the foundation of a … powerful will: the will to ignorance”:201 198 “Но не то тяжело, что будут недовольны героем, тяжело то, что живет в душе неотразимая уверенность, что тем же самым героем, тем же самым Чичиковым были бы довольны читатели. Не загляни автор поглубже ему в душу, не шевельни на дне ее того, что ускользает и прячется от света, не обнаружь сокровеннейших мыслей, которых никому другому не вверяет человек, а покажи его таким, каким он показался всему городу, Манилову и другим людям,—и все были бы радешеньки и приняли бы его за интересного человека. … Да, мои добрые читатели, вам бы не хотелось видеть обнаруженную человеческую бедность. ‘Зачем’,—говорите вы, ‘к чему это? … Лучше же представляйте нам прекрасное, увлекательное. Пусть лучше позабудемся мы!’” (VI, 242–243). 199 “‘Зачем ты, брат, говоришь мне, что дела в хозяйстве идут скверно?’—говорит помещик приказчику. ‘Я, брат, это знаю без тебя, да у тебя речей разве нет других, что ли? Ты дай мне позабыть это, не знать этого, я тогда счастлив’” (VI, 243; emphasis U.H.). 200 “Словом, они были, то что говорится, счастливы” (VI, 26). 201 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 24.

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“I say, my good fellow, how many of our people have died since the time we submitted the figures for the last census?”   “Why, how do you mean, how many? There’s been many dying off since then,” said the steward and hiccuped at the same time, shielding his mouth by slightly cupping his hand over it.   “Yes, I admit I was thinking the same thing myself,” Manilov chimed in with him. “Very many have been dying since then— precisely!” Here he turned around to Chichikov and added once more: “Exactly so—very many.”   “But what, for instance, would their number be?” Chichikov inquired.   “Yes, how many do they number?” Manilov chimed in.   “Why, how is one to say what their number is? For no one knows how many of them died off; nobody kept any count of them.”   “Yes, precisely,” said Manilov, turning to Chichikov. “I also supposed that the mortality had been great; there’s absolutely no knowing how many have died off.”202 The role of the insouciant landowner in the narrator’s parable fits Manilov to perfection. Indeed, his “Yes, I admit I was thinking the same thing myself ” and “Yes, precisely, … I also supposed …” echo the dismissive “Brother, I know that without you” of the digression.

d)  Kifa Mokievich and Mokii Kifovich The detours that end Dead Souls reach their climax in a grotesque flourish immediately before Chichikov’s final flight: the tale of Kifa Mokievich and his son Mokii Kifovich.203 Father and son possess diametrically opposed inclinations: 202 “‘Послушай, любезный! сколько у нас умерло крестьян с тех пор, как подавали ревизию?’—‘Да как сколько? Многие умирали с тех пор’,—сказал приказчик и при этом икнул, заслонив рот слегка рукою наподобие щитка. ‘Да, признаюсь, я сам так думал’,— подхватил Манилов: ‘именно очень многие умирали!’ Тут он оборотился к Чичикову и прибавил еще: ‘Точно, очень многие.’—‘А как, например, числом?’—спросил Чичиков. ‘Да сколько числом?’—подхватил Манилов. ‘Да как сказать числом? Ведь неизвестно, сколько умирало: их никто не считал.’—‘Да, именно’,—сказал Манилов, обратясь к Чичикову: ‘я тоже предполагал, большая смертность; совсем неизвестно, сколько умерло’” (VI, 33). 203 On the meaning of this parable see S. I. Mashinskii, “Mertvye dushi” N. V. Gogolia, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 88–89, who reads it in a Marxist fashion

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

Kifa occupies himself with philosophy, while Mokii is “what is called in Russia a bogatyr, a man of might.”204 While the father racks his brains as to why only some animals, not all, are hatched out of eggs, the son smashes everything he touches to smithereens: [I]n the house and in the neighborhood every living thing, from the house wench to the house dog, would run off yelping at the mere sight of him; he had even smashed the bed in his room all to pieces. … “Have mercy, our father and our master, Kifa Mokievich,“ he was appealed to both by his own domestics and by those of others, “what sort of a man is this Mokii Kifovich of yours? There’s never any rest for a body because of him, he’s such a confounded pest!” “Yes, he’s playful, he’s playful,” his father would usually say in answer to this, “but then, what is one to do?”205 “Such was the mode of life in their peaceful nook,” the narrator concludes, “of these two citizens of Russia who have so unexpectedly peeked, as if out of a little window, at the very end of our epic.”206 Their appearance at this point, however, need not be that unexpected: after all, it mirrors exactly the inner structural logic of Dead Souls. The “little window” is perfectly situated to afford a final glance, before leaving the building altogether, into Manilov’s holy of holies—for the landowner’s garden, we are told, was graced with a temple: “Under two of these [birch trees] one could see an arbor with a low green cupola, blue wooden columns, and as a hidden attack on the Russian pseudo-patriots “up to and including the Tsar,” and V. Sh. Krivonos, “Pritcha o Kife Mokieviche i ee rol′ v “Mertvykh dushakh,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia literatury i iazyka 44, no.1 (1985): 48–56, for whom it represents a Christian moral appeal to a sinful readership. Krivonos only succeeds sketchily in demonstrating the functional link between the tale of Kifa Mokievich and Mokii Kifovich and the overall structure of the novel. 204 “Был он то, что называют на Руси богатырь” (VI, 244). 205 “В доме и в соседстве всё, от дворовой девки до дворовой собаки, бежало прочь, его завидя; даже собственную кровать в спальне изломал он в куски. … ‘Помилуй, батюшка барин, Кифа Мокиевич’,—говорила отцу и своя и чужая дворня: ‘что это у тебя за Мокий Кифович? Никому нет от него покоя, такой припертень!’—‘Да, шаловлив, шаловлив’,— говорил обыкновенно на это отец: ‘да ведь как быть …’” (VI, 244). The genealogical scheme indicates a radicalization of Gogol’s attitude toward the “stupid philosophers” from mockery in The Viy and Diary of a Madman (see Gudrun Langer, “Gogol’s dumme Philosophen. Der Dialog mit der philosophischen Ästhetik in ‘Vij’ und ‘Zapiski sumasšedšego,’” Die Welt der Slaven 41 [1996]: 1–27) to viewing them as positively dangerous. 206 “Так проводили жизнь два обитателя мирного уголка, которые нежданно, как из окошка, выглянули в конце нашей поэмы” (VI, 245).

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an inscription reading: A Temple for Solitary Meditation. …”207 In Manilov’s realm, the most important aspect of the pursuit of philosophy was evidently its ambience—of this Diogenes there remains only the barrel. The landowner’s secret dream is, together with his friend Chichikov, “in the shade of some elm or other … to philosophize about some subject or other, … to go in for something deep!”208 “At home,” the narrator tells us of this otherwise so eloquent figure, “he spoke very little and for the most part gave himself up to meditation and thought, but what he thought was, likewise, known only to God.”209 Although Manilov, we may assume, unlike his fellow philosopher in the concluding parable, does not ask what would happen “if an elephant were to be born in a shell,”210 he too, in his own way, is preoccupied with “how an animal is born”;211 for the formula used of Kifa Mokievich (zanimalsia rozhden′em zveria) has a double meaning. Zver′ refers immediately to mammals as opposed to birds, but in a wider sense it can mean any sort of predator up to and including the beast of the Apocalypse. And Kifa Mokievich, who is entirely indifferent to the condition of his estate, has in fact devoted himself with considerable success to the birth and rearing of such a creature, for with what can his untamable son be better compared than with a predatory animal? And the further comparison with Manilov’s situation lies close at hand, for while that landowner’s estate goes to rack and ruin he spends his time in contemplation, while in his home not one, but two little beasts are raised. At table, one of these, we have seen, bites the other’s ear, while the victim, about to howl out his hurt, suddenly thinks better of it, his immediate human reaction overruled by the law of the wild: Alcides, having shut his eyes and opened his mouth, was all set to begin bawling in a most piteous manner; but, sensing that this might easily lead to being deprived of a course, he restored his mouth to its previous state and, with tears in his eyes, fell to gnawing at a mutton bone, which made both his cheeks glisten with grease.212 207 “Под двумя из них [=берез] видна была беседка с плоским зеленым куполом, деревян­ ными голубыми колоннами и надписью ‘храм уединенного размышления’” (VI, 22). 208 “под тенью какого‑нибудь вяза пофилософствовать о чем‑нибудь, углубиться” (VI, 37). 209 “Дома он говорил очень мало и большею частию размышлял и думал, но о чем он думал, тоже разве богу было известно” (VI, 24). 210 “Ну, а если бы слон родился в яйце” (VI, 244). 211 “отец занимался рожденьем зверя” (VI, 244). 212 “Алкид, зажмурив глаза и открыв рот, готов был зарыдать самым жалким образом, но, почувствовав, что за это легко можно было лишиться блюда, привел рот в прежнее положение и начал со слезами грызть баранью кость, от которой у него обе щеки лоснились жиром” (VI, 31).

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls

Manilov himself concedes in his conversation with his guest: “You’d become rusticated [odichat′, ’go wild’], you know, if you were to lead a cloistered life all the time.”213 One further parallel connects the philosophers of chronicle and prehistory. While the excursus on Kifa Mokievich and Mokii Kifovich is framed by the narrator’s defense against the reproaches of “so-called patriots”214 “who are not concerned about avoiding wrongdoing, but are only concerned lest people get to talking about their wrongdoing,”215 Manilov, whose defining characteristic is the systematic beautification of the mean and ugly, cites all too readily “the ultimate welfare of Russia.”216 Indeed, he takes as his only newspaper the Son of the Fatherland (Syn Otechestva; VI, 29). To conclude: In the final section of the prehistory Chichikov’s fictive biography resolves into a series of rhetorical asides dramatically embodied in the figure of Manilov. This adept of fine style, sketched in the first episode of the chronicle, has been reading the same book for two years without getting past page fourteen.217 On closer scrutiny, the detailed convergencies between the first of Gogol’s landowners and the concluding digressions of Dead Souls prove unmistakable.

213 “Одичаешь, знаете, если будешь всё время жить взаперти” (VI, 28). 214 “Еще падет обвинение на автора со стороны так называемых патриотов” (VI, 243). 215 “обвиненье со стороны некоторых горячих патриотов …, думающих не о том, чтобы не делать дурного, а о том, чтобы только не говорили, что они делают дурное” (VI, 245). 216 “дальнейши[е] вид[ы] России” (VI, 35). 217 See VI, 25.

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Figure 8. The Labyrinth of the World in the form of a circular city, drawn by Johann Amos Comenius for his The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, 1631

CHAPTER 3

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls Revisited

Where are we going? Home, always home. Novalis, Henry of Ofterdingen Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind1 With some justification it can be said that Chichikov’s adventures are “the history of his own soul.” Like the hero of a medieval epic, he must pass a moral test at every stage of his journey, the difference being that his aventures become a chain of defeats, for his adversaries are not of flesh and blood, they are the ghosts of his past. Five malevolent Chichikovs, past and present, raise their heads in turn against him: the false friend, the magician-extortionist, the lawless customs officer, the whitecollar gangster, the youthful Scrooge. The pattern Gogol sketched for Dead Souls in his Correspondence includes an almost perfect blueprint for Chichikov: “It was done like this: I took one of his bad qualities and sought to mold it into the shape of a mortal foe.” That the character only on one occasion perceives his adversary as such is entirely congruent with the logic of his moral corruption: he is one for whom the highest Christian values are mere pawns. Revealingly, Nozdrev alone instills fear in him, and with Nozdrev he fails to clinch a deal. The significance of this will become clearer in the chapter on the “Shadow Realm of Lies”; but, before going on, we must update our perception of the ground plan of Dead Souls.

1 Novalis, Werke, trans. and comm. Gerhard Schulz, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1987), 267; ­Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 191.

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Table 2. 

Having completed our initial reading, we can see that Gogol’s novel has taken us round in a circle.2 At their extremities, the two structural elements of chronicle and prehistory—which in Table 1 were compared with the wings of a symmetrical building—touch: Chichikov’s visit to Manilov and the corresponding episode of his career resumé are joined seamlessly (Table 2), and the biography of the central character that concludes the narrative ends in the present of the chronicle. Accordingly, we find ourselves toward the end of the novel entering a place the narrator designates as “any town,”3 which we may justifiably identify as “the town of N–”4 from the opening paragraph of Dead Souls. The work, then, evinces a perfectly cyclical structure.5 Chichikov leaves the town of N–1 (­Chapter One) on a five-stage tour of procurement (Chapters Two–Six), and returns with his booty to N–2, where he likewise passes through five stages— with these we shall be concerned only later (Chapters Seven–Eleven). Again he leaves the town, this time not as victor but as fugitive, and the narrator uses the preparation for his flight to embark on a journey into Chichikov’s past, which— again after five episodes—returns to the town of N–3.

2 Igor′ P. Zolotusskii, Gogol′, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1984), 256, grasps the cyclical structure of Dead Souls but without connecting Chichikov’s present adventures with his final return to his starting point. 3 “Въезд в какой бы ни было город” (VI, 241). 4 “город NN” (VI, 7). 5 For a recent exposition of the overall structure of Dead Souls see Tschilschke, Epen des ­Trivialen, 61–81.

The Ground Plan of Dead Souls Revisited

Chichikov completes the entire multilayered cycle without progressing an iota in his personal development. The iconic image of the flawed wheel—or, indeed, the wheel as flaw—runs as a leitmotif through the book from Chichikov’s entry into the town to his final decision to flee.6 All spatial movement in Part One of Dead Souls, of which there is a great deal, leaves him inwardly untouched. Significantly, the first moment that offers the restless traveler an opportunity for inner growth is when his carriage crashes into an oncoming vehicle and his physical progress is brought to a standstill, granting him the sudden vision of his Beatrice.7 Only when he has completed the cycle and returned home to his starting point can he be borne in his flying carriage—flung tangentially, as it were, from the wheel—into the second part of the trilogy, where, in Gogol’s master plan, he was to slowly gather linear momentum in a learning process. The novel’s closing invocation of a soaring troika whose steeds are “all transformed into straight lines cleaving the air”8 perfectly conveys this trajectory. Two strands of this construct have a deeper symbolic meaning: the number five and the image of the town. Five traditionally denotes the twin poles of the moral spectrum in man: “Fivefold is the soul of man,/ of good and bad composed,/ as five the first of numbers stands/ of odd and even made.”9 Chichikov, too— the model man sent by his maker on a quest with (at this point in his progress) two-times-five stages—is called upon to choose between “odd” and “even.” The image of the town, for its part, has been enshrined since the Middle Ages in the allegory of the human pilgrimage between an earthly and a heavenly city. Jan Comenius’s baroque Labyrinth of the World, for example, expressed the human 6 On the metaphor of the wheel see Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 81f., 102; Proffer, The Simile and Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 132f.; Richard Peace, The Enigma of Gogol. An Examination of the Writings of N. V. Gogol and Their Place in the Russian Literary Tradition (Cambridge, London, New York, et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 256, 334. 7 Chichikov’s restlessness is a clearly diabolical feature: “the devil … knows that his time is short!” (Rev. 12:12). On satanic acceleration see Ernst Benz, “Zeit, Endzeit, Ewigkeit,” Eranos Jahrbuch 47 (1978): Zeit und Zeitlosigkeit, ed. Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema, 21–22. 8 “почти не тронув копытами земли, превратились в одни вытянутые линии, летящие по воздуху” (VI, 247). See Aage A. Hansen‑Löve, “‘Gøgøl’’—Zur Poetik der Null- und Leerstelle,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 39 (1997): 246–248. On the possible Platonic background to the troika image see Mikhail Vaiskopf, “Ptitsa-troika i kolesnitsa dushi: Platon i ­Gogol′,” in Iurii V. Mann, ed., Gogol′. Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995), 99–117. On the other hand, Lidiia I. Sazonova, “Literaturnaia rodoslovnaia gogolevskoj ptitsy troika,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 59, no. 2 (2000): 23–30, sees the novel’s final image as referring back to Stefan Yavorsky and the prophet Ezekiel. 9 Schiller, The Piccolomini (act 2, scene 1) (I am indebted to Frank Pressler for this reference). It should be noted in this context that the five landowners who serve as mirrors of Chichikov’s soul form two distinct groups containing two and three respectively (see the chapter on the “Shadow Realm of Lies” in Part Two of this study).

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condition with this image, and even gave the city a circular form—see Comenius’s hand-drawn image (Plate 8). Chichikov’s departure from the town of N– marks at least the possibility of escape from the world’s senselessly rotating cycle, whose structure in so many ways resembles the Comenian labyrinth. As such, it can also be read as the key moment on a route-plan for Christian abnegation of the world.10 Only when the earthly cycle has been completed will the pilgrim, stirred by the call of conscience, realize that progress is possible on one path alone: the way of inward awareness and reflection on one’s own past.11 Those bold enough to embark on this detour—for it is such—will cease to move in circles and finally be thrust in a straight line out of the world.

10 Gogol’s proximity to Comenius is evident from the metaphor of the labyrinth in his famous letter to A. S. Danilevsky ( June 20, 1843), where the homo interior is contrasted with the homo exterior. The latter, Gogol affirms, “wanders eternally in the labyrinths of the mind” (“блуждая вечно в лабиринтах ума”; XII, 196, emphasis U.H.). On the Labyrinth of the World see in this respect Jan Patočka’s lucid essay on “Comenius and the Open Soul,” in his Kunst und Zeit. Kulturphilosophische Schriften, ed. Klaus Nellen and Ilja Srubar (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), 175–190. 11 Sergei A. Goncharov, Tvorchestvo N. V. Gogolia i traditsiia uchitel′noi kul′tury (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1992) describes the inner movement of Dead Souls as a transition from homo exterior to homo interior, corresponding with Parts One and Two of the novel. Broadly speaking, this accords with the argument of the present study. As we have seen, however, on closer scrutiny the arc from outward to inward man reveals itself as already subtly prepared by the author in Part One of Dead Souls (on this point see also pp. 230–231).

CHAPTER 4

On Truth and Lies in a Moral Sense1

… a true man in untruth clad. A wooden image is not a man, but if you understand at all, you’ll understand this well: of a man, too, this would tell. Tales of adventure, though not true, yet teach us all the more what each and every one should do. Thomasin of Cerclaria, The Stranger from the South2

Although we have not yet drawn together all the threads connecting Chichikov’s prehistory with his visits to the five landowners, it must already be apparent that in the tautness of its structure Dead Souls is virtually without parallel in Russian literature. Nevertheless, for the late Gogol, aesthetic accomplishment was not an end in itself. The most playful detail of his great tapestry has its allotted place in a strictly ethical pattern: a systematic exposition of guilt

1 In his early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Nietzsche explains the human “drive for truth” as the result of a moral agreement to rein in the “art of pretense” that is more highly developed in humanity than in any other species (Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Munich, Berlin, and New York: De Gruyter, 1980], vol. 1, 876–877). 2 “daz wâr man mit lüge kleit. / ein hülzîn bilde ist niht ein man: / swer ave iht verstên kan, / der mac daz verstên wol / daz ez einen man bezeichen sol. / sint die âventiur niht wâr, / si bezeichent doch vil gar / waz ein ieglîch man tuon sol” (Thomasin von Circlære, Der welsche Gast, quoted in Karl-Heinz Göttert, Tugendbegriff und epische Struktur in höfischen Dichtungen. Heinrichs des Glîchezâre “Reinhart Fuchs” und Konrads von Würzburg “Engelhard” [Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1971], 10).

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and retribution. Each of Gogol’s landowners presents a different facet of the central character’s former self; in a precise counter-movement to the chronology of Chichikov’s life, each in turn opens a new page in the account book of his failings. This we have seen. It is time now to seek the thread linking together the five facets of Chichikov’s character. It may be said in anticipation that in the course of the novel this element reveals itself with growing clarity as rooted in Chichikov’s disaffection for the Eighth Commandment, an injunction already abused by his father: Chichikov’s fault, the stain on his character, lies in his profligate attitude to truth.3 In order to gain a conception of the importance of this point for the structure of Dead Souls, we must delve a little more deeply into a matter already touched upon in the Introduction: Gogol’s troubled relationship with truth and falsehood. The exaggerated pathos that led him to accuse himself of lying, before finally robbing him altogether of his voice as a storyteller, has recognizably psychological origins. Those deeps, however, cannot be plumbed by the instruments of literary science; all such tools can do—and here they are in their element—is to chart the textual waters around that vortex, surveying the works on which Gogol drew and whose currents influenced the thinking of his time. This will take us from Gogol’s own observations on Schiller via the PlatonicChristian context right back to Homer—which may seem a long way round, but it will lead us in the end to the heart of the novel.

1. Schiller’s Distinction between False and Aesthetical Appearances In the “Fragment of a letter written to a literary acquaintance shortly after the premiere of The Government Inspector,” Gogol defined what he understood as lying. Dissatisfied with the performance of the main actor, who was clearly

3 For Kant, the “stain on our species” lies in “the dishonesty and self-delusion that hinders the growth within us of a true moral sense” and then naturally extends to “outward falsehood and the deception of others.” Evil in human nature is, then, radically connected with the problem of truth and lying (Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, ed. Rudolf Malter [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974], 47). In his Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Traktats zum ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie (Announcement of the Forthcoming Conclusion of a Philosophic Sketch on Perpetual Peace), Kant speaks even more clearly of “lying” as the “real stain on human nature” (section 2). On Kant’s critique of lying, see Arno Baruzzi, Philosophie der Lüge (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 74–100.

O n Tr u t h a n d L i e s i n a M o r a l S e n s e

overtaxed by the role of Khlestakov, he declared: “Our actors simply do not know how to lie. They equate lying with talking nonsense. But what lying means is to tell untruth in a tone so close to truth, a tone so natural and so naïve that it can only be speaking truth. There, precisely, lies the comical side of lying.”4 The skillful liar, in other words, utters falsehood so naturally and naïvely that it sounds like truth. And here Gogol’s choice of words—“truth,” “natural,” “naïve”—echoes strikingly back to Schiller’s essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. Just as Gogol ascribes the comical aspect of lying precisely to its naïveté, so, for Schiller, naïveté “amuses” when it occurs “against the knowledge and will” of the person in question.5 Where, then, does Khlestakov stand in this respect? Khlestakov does not deceive; he is neither a swindler nor a professional liar; he forgets that he is lying and almost believes what he is saying. He talks himself into full swing, sees that things are going well and his audience is listening keenly. This adds ease and fluency to his speech; it flows from his heart. He is wholly honest: in lying, he shows himself for what he is.6 And in doing so he makes us laugh. According to Schiller, the naïve amuses us because “here … the natural character, set free by emotion, confesses the truth.” Hence

4 “Вообще у нас актеры совсем не умеют лгать. Они воображают, что лгать значит просто нести болтовню. Лгать значит говорить ложь тоном так близким к истине, так естественно, так наивно, как можно только говорить одну истину; и здесь‑то заключается именно всё комическое лжи” (IV, 99–100; emphasis U.H.). 5 Über naive and sentimentalische Dichtung, in Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eduard von der Hellen (Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta, 1904–1905), vol. 12, 161–263, here 167 (English translation by W. F. Wertz [Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 2005]). Schiller called this mode of naivety the “naïve of surprise,” which “amuses,” in contrast to the “naïve of disposition,” which “is moving” (ibid.). As the latter can be ignored in the context of comedy, all references to the naïve in the following paragraphs are to the “naïve of surprise.” 6 “Хлестаков вовсе не надувает; он не лгун по ремеслу; он сам позабывает, что лжет, и уже сам почти верит тому, что говорит. Он развернулся, он в духе, видит, что всё идет хорошо, его слушают—и по тому одному он говорит плавнее, развязнее, говорит от души, говорит совершенно откровенно и, говоря ложь, выказывает именно в ней себя таким, как есть” (IV, 99). On lying in The Government Inspector see also Schamma Schahadat, “Rußland: Reich der falschen Zeichen. Die Lüge, das Wort und die Macht bei Gogol′, Suchovo Kobylin, Erdman und Mejerchol′d,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 44 (1997): 110–118.

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… we attribute to the person [in question] no merit for this sincerity, and our laughter is well-deserved derision, which is held back through no … high estimation. Since, nevertheless, it is here still the sincerity of nature which breaks through the veil of falsehood, so is contentment of a higher kind combined with the malicious enjoyment of having caught someone out. … We therefore also feel in respect to the naive … a really moral pleasure, although not in regard to a moral character.7 Khlestakov embodies the paradox of the man who, carried away by his own fertile imagination, reveals himself just as he is—who, therefore, in the very act of lying wears his heart on his sleeve. In doing so, he fulfills to the letter S­ chiller’s postulate of naïveté: “It is required of the naive, that nature bring forth the victory thereof over art”—the victory of “truth in contrast to deceit.”8 Schiller’s essay treats of “[p]oetry,” not of lying;9 it has to do with Homer rather than Khlestakov.10 But in Gogol’s perspective the distinction loses its clarity: Khlestakov’s maker views him, the archetypal figure of the braggart, as a poet sui generis: “Khlestakov operates neither with cold detachment nor with theatrical display; he swindles with feeling. His eyes express the pleasure he takes in it: it is the most beautiful and poetic moment of his life, almost a form of inspiration.”11 That Gogol’s conception of lying responds so well to Schiller’s formulation of the naïve in poetry is no coincidence, for it is under Schiller’s impact that Gogol developed his lifelong hope that art might have a salutary moral effect. Gogol’s growing tendency to equate storytelling with lying, however, cannot justly be

 7 Schiller, Schillers Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, 169 (for English translation ref. see note 5).   8 Ibid., 166–167 (for English translation ref. see note 5).   9 Schiller does nevertheless discuss at the beginning of his essay the possibility of subverting people’s delight in the naïve by intentionally imitating it. If, “by means of the most perfect deception, the appearance of nature” were to be presented to us, “so would the discovery, that it be imitation, completely destroy the feeling of which we are speaking” (ibid., 162; for English translation ref. see note 5). 10 Homer, alongside Shakespeare, represented for Schiller the incarnation of the naïve poet (ibid., 184–186). 11 “Хлестаков лжет вовсе не холодно или фанфаронски‑театрально; он лжет с чувством, в глазах его выражается наслаждение, получаемое им от этого. Это вообще лучшая и самая поэтическая минута в его жизни—почти род вдохновения” (IV, 100; emphasis U.H.). See the chapter “Khlestakov as the Ideal Poet in Travesty,” in Rosemarie K. ­Jenness, Gogol’s Aesthetics Compared to Major Elements of German Romanticism (New York et al.: Lang, 1995), 22–26. Jenness does not refer to the Schillerian background in this context.

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blamed on his mentor: in letter 26 upon the aesthetic education of man, ­Schiller distinguishes very clearly between the recognizable honesty of “aesthetical appearance” and the “false and paltry semblance” created only to deceive.12 And he defends himself outspokenly against those moral apostles who denigrate the cultural achievements of their world—of whom the late Gogol was to become a prime example: Nothing is more common than to hear depreciators of the times utter these paltry complaints that all solidity has disappeared from the world, and that essence is neglected for semblance. … Not only do they attack the artificial coloring that hides truth and replaces reality, but also the beneficent appearance. …13 On this score, then, Schiller must be exonerated from responsibility for the confusions of his Russian follower. All the more striking is the unconscious similarity between the structure of Gogol’s theory of lying and Schiller’s poetics of the naïve—an analogy that shows how radically Gogol identified art with cheating, cheating with art. Another telling sign of this radicalization is his use of language. In Russian, the act of lying can be expressed by two different verbs: vrat′ and lgat′, including their derivations vran′e vs. lozh′ (lie) and vrun vs. lgun (liar). What both have in common is their opposition to truth. They are therefore frequently used interchangeably. Lgat′, though, implies deliberate, self-serving falsification whereas vrat′ describes a more innocent deviation from truth: a kind of playful fantasizing that can be pursued without any intention of personal gain. A liar in the sense of vrun is not necessarily a sinner, a lgun positively is. Most readers would call Khlestakov’s uncontrollable fits of bragging mere acts of vran′e. Not so Gogol! In the above-quoted passages on the premiere of The Government Inspector, he consistently rates them as lozh′, and Khlestakov as a lgun. The same tendency can be observed in Dead Souls. Sure, whenever the characters argue, the retort vresh′, you are lying, is exchanged with the speed of a ping-pong ball. But when the narrator himself comments on the precarious human relation with truth, he tends to use the root lgat′. This is no accident. To say it more

12 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man), in Schiller, Schillers Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, 3–120, here 109. 13 Ibid.

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poignantly: as soon as Gogol begins to reflect upon lying, it becomes for him a matter of moral or theological concern.14

2.  The Homeric Liar-Hero Khlestakov and Homer—at first sight it is an absurd juxtaposition, yet one that puts the late Gogol’s dilemma in a nutshell. He had hoped that his C ­ orrespondence with Friends would, in combination with Dead Souls, seal his claim to be a kind of Russian Homer. When it was panned by the critics he had called himself a “Khlestakov.”15 And in a certain sense Gogol’s novel arose, too, in competition with Homer—namely, with Zhukovsky’s contemporary translation of the Odyssey.16 His letters to Zhukovsky reveal something of his ambitions for his own epic: “Sometimes I think Part Two of Dead Souls could serve Russian readers as a kind of threshold to Homer.”17 Conversely, an earlier letter testifies to the importance of Homer for Gogol as a stepping-stone through his initial difficulties and as an aesthetic benchmark for Dead Souls: I had long had the idea of a major work that would show all that is good and bad in the Russian and reveal to us more clearly the essence of our Russian nature. I noted and collected many

14 See VI, 173, 188, 207–209, 224. 15 See letters to Zhukovsky (March 6, 1847 [XIII, 243]) and Arkadii Rosset (April 15, 1847 [XIII, 279]). 16 See letters to Zhukovsky (March 28, 1843 [XII, 157], December 2, 1843 [XII, 239], and Fall 1849 [XIV, 152]). See also letter to A. S. Danilevsky (February 25, 1849), where Gogol compares the potential reception of Part Two of Dead Souls in Russia with that of Zhukovsky’s Odyssey (XIV, 107). All these letters were written after publication of Part One of Dead Souls; but Gogol’s ambition to be seen as treading in Homer’s footsteps is already apparent much earlier, for example with Taras Bul′ba, whose text he revised in a Homeric sense while working on Dead Souls (see Carl R. Proffer, The Simile and Gogol’s “Dead Souls” [The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967], 75 and 167ff.; and Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 78f.). In light of Gogol’s evident rivalry with Zhukovsky, Robert Maguire’s apodictic statement (Robert A. Maguire, Exploring Gogol [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994], 300) that Gogol never set his epic on a par with Homer requires qualification. That Gogol had earlier entertained a similarly competitive relationship with Pushkin can be seen from the lines he wrote to Pletnev immediately after Pushkin’s death: “Ни одна строка не писалась без того, чтобы я не воображал его пред собою” (XI, 88). 17 “Временами мне кажется, что II‑й том ‘Мерт душ’ мог бы послужить для русских читателей некоторою ступенью к чтенью Гомера” (letter to Zhukovsky, December 14, 1849 [XIV, 156]).

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isolated aspects, but no overall plan came to me with the force and clarity that would stir me into writing. At every step I realized that so much was missing, that I was in no position to link or even separate the individual events: I first had to study the structure of the major creations of the great masters. So I set to, and began with our beloved Homer. It soon seemed to me that I had begun to understand and could even adopt something of his manner and artistry—but my ability to create still did not return. My head ached with tension. With great effort I somehow succeeded in launching the first part of Dead Souls into the world, as if to gauge with it how far removed I still was from my goal.18 That an author should take the work of a great predecessor as a measure and stimulus for his own creativity is not unusual—and the prominence Gogol gives to “structure” in this context is worth noting. But the significance of Homer for Gogol is even greater: he regards him not only as an aesthetic but, extraordinarily enough, also as an ethical master and guide. The passage of Correspondence with Friends that refers to Zhukovsky’s translation of the Odyssey begins: “The publication of the Odyssey is an epoch-making event. The Odyssey is, without a doubt, the most consummate achievement of any age. Its matter is vast and powerful; the Iliad, in comparison, is merely episodic.”19 Gogol’s judgment rested here on moral rather than artistic grounds. The tale of the great wanderer was, for him, not merely the most comprehensive ethical codex of antiquity, it was one of the “most moral of all works”20—a surprising

18 “Уже давно занимала меня мысль большого сочиненья, в котором бы предстало всё, что ни есть и хорошего и дурного в русском человеке, и обнаружилось бы пред нами видней свойство нашей русской природы. Я видел и обнимал порознь много частей, но план целого никак не мог предо мной выясниться и определиться в такой силе, чтобы я мог уже приняться и начать писать. На всяком шагу я чувствовал, что мне многого недостает, что я не умею еще ни завязывать, ни развязывать событий и что мне нужно выучиться постройке больших творений у великих мастеров. Я принялся за них, начиная с нашего любезного Гомера. Уже мне показалось было, что я начинаю кое‑что понимать и приобретать даже их приемы и замашки,—а способность творить всё не возвращалась. От напряженья болела голова. С большими усилиями удалось мне кое‑как выпустить в свет первую часть ‘Мертвых душ’, как бы затем, чтобы увидеть на ней, как я был еще далек от того, к чему стремился” (letter to Zhukovsky, December 29, 1847–January 10, 1848 [XIV, 35–36]). 19 “Появление Одиссеи произведет эпоху. Одиссея есть решительно совершеннейшее произведение всех веков. Объем ее велик; Илиада пред нею эпизод” (VIII, 236). 20 “Одиссея есть вместе с тем самое нравственнейшее произведение” (VIII, 238).

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statement in light of the attacks to which the work was subjected in antiquity, precisely on moral grounds and specifically because of the bard’s ambivalent attitude to truth.21 In this respect Homer’s eulogy to the most unscrupulous of all artful Achaeans was seen as clearly inferior to the Iliad: Plato’s Hippias, for example, considered Achilles’s love of truth morally superior to “the lying” ­Odysseus.22 That Gogol should turn this judgment on its head was due to his convictions not as an artist but, paradoxically, as a Christian moralist. This is all the more remarkable given the emphasis he put in his late work on the question of lying versus truth—an issue he saw as the foundation stone of his entire ethical world model. And significantly, the one exception Gogol made in his plea for the Odyssey as a moral guide concerned the “inadequacy” of Greek religion, which “even allowed recourse to deceit, revenge, and treachery when it came to defeating the enemy.”23 The nineteenth-century Russian should evidently follow Odysseus, then, in many things, but not in his highly flexible approach to truth. Here Gogol questions the exemplary quality of the Homeric hero. What, however, remains of the cunning Odysseus if one casts doubt on his principal epitheton ornans?24 What becomes of such a hero if he grows ashamed of his trickery? The answer in all brevity is—a Chichikov.

21 See Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 6th ed. (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1967), 210–211; see also the section on “Die ästhetisch motivierte Unwahrheit,” in Rudolf Schottlaender, “Die Lüge in der Ethik der griechisch‑römischen Philosophie,” in Die Lüge in psychologischer, philosophischer, juristischer, pädagogischer, historischer, soziologischer, sprach- und literaturwissenschaftlicher und entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Betrachtung, ed. Otto Lipmann and Paul Plaut (Leipzig: Barth, 1927), 98–121, here 106–108. 22 Plato, Hippias minor, 364e–365c. For Plato’s critique of Homer see Stefan Weinstock, “Die platonische Homerkritik und ihre Nachwirkung,” Philologus 82 (1927): 121–153; on the r­ eproach of mendacity leveled at Odysseus see also Volker Sommer, Lob der Lüge. Täuschung und Selbstbetrug bei Tier und Mensch (Munich: Beck, 1992), 14. Plato’s attitude to truth and lying is, however, more ambivalent than might appear from isolated texts. In both the Politeia (389b) and the Nomoi (663b–664b) he explicitly tolerates lying in the interests of the state; but only the ruler is entitled to such an act, and the ruler—for Plato, ideally, a philosopher—has already perceived truth in its highest form. Truth, then, remains the highest value; lying is allowed only as a pedagogical measure in the service of truth. 23 “древний человек, … со всем несовершенством своей религии, дозволявшей даже обманывать, мстит и прибегать к коварству для истребления врага” (VIII, 244). 24 The Greek epithets are, for example, πολύτροπος, πολυμήχανος, πολύμητις (Der kleine Pauly. Lexikon der Antike, ed. Konrat Ziegler and Walther Sontheimer [Munich: DTV, 1979], vol. 4, col. 242; for English version see Brill’s New Pauly).

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Figure 9. Demons of lying and garrulity (eighteenth-century Russian image)

3.  The Platonic-Christian Truth-Ethos Against the primordial Greek “theology of malice,”25 which allowed the gods to willfully mislead the human race—hence, too, against Homer—Plato26 had asserted a divinity that was “wholly without falsehood.”27 Augustine elevated the 25 The expression derives from Paul Ricoeur, Symbolik des Bösen. Phänomenologie der Schuld II (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1971), 104. 26 Plato, Politeia, 382e–383c; on the development of the concept of truth since Plato see also Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Mit einem Brief über den “Humanismus” (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1947). 27 Walter Bröcker outlined the consequences of this “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche) as follows: “Plato transformed piety into morality, with the consequence that the moral was no longer moral because it was beloved of the gods, but the other way round: the gods loved the moral because it was moral. And the gods could now only love the moral. In other words,

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question of truth into the decisive issue for Christians,28 and Kant extended this to humanity at large.29 Gogol basically maintained the longstanding PlatonicChristian position, which neither secularization30 nor modern psychoanalysis31 could topple—indeed, the latter discipline also draws its vigor ultimately from the Eighth Commandment. With some justice Nietzsche described the history of Christianity as that of the erection of truth into an absolute—one that finally threatened Christianity itself.32 “What,” Nietzsche asked, “has actually overcome the Christian God?” You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness understood ever more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. … Once Christian truthfulness had drawn one

­ orality was now a divine instance above the gods. Being no longer based on religion, mom rality now became the precursor of atheism. In turning to morality, religion, then, brought about its own downfall. In light of what he hoped to gain, Plato had lost sight altogether of what he stood to lose” (Walter Bröcker, Platos Gespräche [Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1964], 130). 28 Augustine in Contra mendacium (Aurelius Augustinus, Die Lüge und Gegen die Lüge, trans. and comment. Paul Keseling [Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1953], 115–116) goes so far as to rank homicida veritas (the murderous truth) higher than mendacium salubre (the salvific lie). See also Baruzzi, Philosophie der Lüge, 45–60. 29 See esp. Kant, Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy, 1797). 30 See, for example, Albert Görland, “The problem of lying has been the quaestio magna of ethics from Augustine to our own day” (“Der Begriff der Lüge im System der Ethiker von Spinoza bis zur Gegenwart,” in Lipmann and Plaut, Die Lüge, 122–157, here 123). 31 The very title of Alice Miller’s book, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (1984) plays on this genealogy; indeed, the author’s pathos rises at times to furor. Léon Wurmser provides a more circumspect and learned treatment of the problematic of lying and repression of truth in relation to the “ur-problem of the lie” in Léon Wurmser, Die zerbrochene Wirklichkeit. Psychoanalyse als das Studium von Konflikt und Komplementarität, 2nd ed. (Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York: Springer, 1993), 9 (see also 10–12, 67–68 and passim). 32 This tendency began long before historical research into Jesus’s life; it is already there in the radical Gnostic Gospel of Truth, which relates the myth of the Fall from the perspective of the serpent as a tale of God’s jealousy of the human desire for knowledge (see Elaine Pagels, Versuchung durch Erkenntnis. Die gnostischen Evangelien [Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1987], 181–188; idem, Adam, Eva und die Schlange. Die Theologie der Sünde, trans. K. Neff [Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991], 153–155). In The Justification of the Good (1918) Vladimir Solovyev opposed, from a Christian point of view, the elevation of truth into an absolute (see Wladimir Solowjew, Deutsche Gesamtausgabe, ed. Wladimir Szylkarski, Wilhelm Lettenbauer, and Ludolf Müller [Freiburg: Wewel, 1953–1980], vol. 5, 174–184).

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c­ onclusion after another, it finally drew its most powerful conclusion, its conclusion against itself. …33 In the face of such conclusions Dostoevsky would be overcome by doubt;34 but Gogol was far removed from that. The context within which he approached the issue of truth and lying had been staked out by the Fathers of the Church, and before that by the Bible itself.35 If anything, he tended—as already noted in the Introduction—to exceed the traditional teachings, especially where lying was concerned. In the wake of his crisis at the end of the 1830s he is known to have immersed himself with growing intensity in the Early Church Fathers, as well as in more recent writings from both the Eastern and Western Churches.36 He might even have found, in the missionary preaching of the thirteenth-century Franciscan Berthold von Regensburg, a classification of five particularly odious types of lie that in many respects seems to anticipate Dead Souls.37 Be that as it 33 Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, 409–410. In his “Attempt at Self-Criticism” (a later addition to the Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche formulated the opposition between the artistic and the radically Christian perspective that so troubled the late Gogol: “To tell the truth, there is nothing which stands more in opposition to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world … than Christian teaching, which is and will remain merely moralistic and which, with its absolute moral standards (for example, the truthfulness of God), relegates art to the realm of lies—in other words, which denies art, condemns it, and passes sentence on it” (ibid., vol. 1, 18; English translation: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ian C. Johnston, accessed December 16, 2020, www.russoeconomics.altervista.org/Nietzsche.pdf); see also note 41 below. 34 See also Dostoevsky’s famous letter to Mme. Fonvizina (dated late January–February 20, 1854; Fedor M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990], vol. 28, part 1, 176). Dostoevsky’s essay “Nechto o vran′e” in A Writer’s Diary (1873) also treats of lying (see ibid., vol. 21, 117–125). 35 The specifically “Russian … cultural tradition according to which not a single textual sign could be changed without cosmic consequences” is also relevant in this context (see Schahadat, “Rußland: Reich der falschen Zeichen,” 99). 36 Especially after 1842, Gogol’s correspondence shows that, while abroad, he had the works not only of the Church Fathers, but also of Bishops Innokenty, Dmitry of Rostov and Tikhon of Zadonsk, as well as Bossuet and Aquinas sent to him. Yazykov also sent him a copy of the Dobrotoliubie (published 1840), which became a key work for his development (see Nikolai V. Gogol′, Dukhovnaia proza, ed. and comment. V. A. Voropaev and I. A. Vinogradov [Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1992], 7). From fall 1839 through spring 1840—by which time he had completed Dead Souls at least as far as Chapter Six—Gogol was, however, in Russia; so the letters cannot be taken to provide reliable evidence of his reading during this important phase of his creativity. 37 Taking his cue from Augustine, Berthold distinguishes eight types of lie, five of which he declares to be “mortal sins” and three “venial.” Berthold’s classification does not exactly fit the hypothesis assumed here for Gogol, nor has anything yet come to light to suggest that Gogol was familiar with the Franciscan’s writings. Nevertheless, there are some striking parallels: Berthold describes the fifth type of lie as “scolding the praiseworthy and praising

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may, he would certainly have been familiar with Augustine’s attitude to lying, even if it cannot be shown that he had actually read the treatise De mendacio.38 Had he done so, he would certainly have taken it as a commentary on Chlestakov’s (and his own) love of inventive storytelling. Of this, section 18 of De mendacio has the following to say: Nor are those lies to be allowed, which, though they hurt not another, yet do nobody any good, and are hurtful to the persons themselves who gratuitously tell them. Indeed, these are the persons who are properly to be called liars. For there is a difference between lying and being a liar. A man may tell a lie unwillingly; but a liar loves to lie, and inhabits in his mind … the delight of lying. Next to such are those to be placed who by a lie wish to please men, not that they may do wrong or bring reproach upon any man … but that they may be pleasant in conversation. … Now these two sorts of lies do no harm to those who believe them. … But to the persons who tell these lies, they do much harm: to the former sort, because they so desert truth as to rejoice in deceit: to the latter, because they want to please people better than the truth.39 In section 25, Augustine classifies the modes of lying even more succinctly, foremost among them “that which is done through only lust of lying and deceiving”: this, the “unmixed lie,” is the lie in its purest form.40 In all of this, Augustine did the ­delinquent” (exactly what Sobakevich and Manilov do) and the third type as the sin of “miserliness” (Pliushkin), on which he writes at some length (Berthold von Regensburg, Die Missionspredigten des Franziskaners Berthold von Regensburg, ed. Franz Göbel, introd. Alban Stolz, 2nd rev. and ext. ed. [Regensburg: Manz, 1857], 311–313). The first German selection of Berthold’s sermons was published by C. F. Kling in 1824 and reviewed by Jakob Grimm in Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 32 (1825). The Augustinian list of eight lies, five of them mortal sins, can be found there, albeit in very antiquated German (Berthold von Regensburg, Berthold, des Franciskaners deutsche Predigten, aus der zweiten Hälfte des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, theils vollständig, theils in Auszügen, ed. Christian Friedrich Kling, introd. A. Neander [Berlin: Dümmler, 1824], 88–92). 38 For Gogol’s knowledge of Augustine see Hildegund Schreier, Gogol’s religiöses Weltbild und sein literarisches Werk. Zur Antagonie zwischen Kunst und Tendenz (Munich: Sagner, 1977), 88; Peter Thiergen, “Gogol’s ‘Mantel’ und die Bergpredigt,” in Gattungen in den slavischen Literaturen. Beiträge zu ihren Formen in der Geschichte. Festschrift für Alfred Rammelmeyer, ed. Hans-Bernd Harder and Hans Rothe (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1988), 397ff. 39 Augustinus, Die Lüge und Gegen die Lüge, 28–29. 40 Ibid., 37; see also De mendacio, section 42 (ibid., 59). In the Nicomachean Ethics (1127 b16) Aristotle had already described the type of “liar that delights simply in the act of lying.”

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not have in mind the fictions of art or poetry, which might be classified as honest lies.41 His critique of literature—for example, in Book I of the Confessions with regard to the Aeneid—is concerned rather with the potential of fictive worlds for distraction than with deception as such.42 Other Fathers of the Church, like the early Apologists,43 were less differentiated and ascribed poetic creation unhesitatingly to the devil as the father of lies.44 If one thinks of the pride taken by many a Romantic poet in this demonic ancestry,45 Gogol’s radical reading of the Christian sources becomes less puzzling—with this difference, that what his contemporaries considered a feather in their cap he understood in its original sense, as a flaw.46

41 Johannes Lindworsky observed that “when there is no intention to deceive, Augustine does not speak of a lie. Thus he does not view a joke as a lie” (see his “Das Problem der Lüge bei katholischen Ethikern and Moralisten,” in Lipmann and Plaut, Die Lüge, 53–72, here 53). Indeed, Augustine compares the divine creation with an epigram or sonnet (Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 537), which might be seen as militating against Nietzsche’s generalized condemnation of Christianity’s antagonism to art (see note 33). 42 Aurelius Augustinus, Bekenntnisse, trans., ed., and comment. Kurt Flasch and Burkhard Mojsisch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989), 47; idem, De vera religione. Über die wahre Religion, trans. and ed. W. Thimme (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 166. 43 See Walter Rehm, Kierkegaard und der Verführer (Munich: Rinn, 1949), 327; Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 538, note 3: “The thought is already present in Justin’s First Apology (c. 54): ‘We can also prove that they (myths made by men) were conceived for the stupefaction and seduction of humankind under the influence of evil spirits.’” 44 Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595) was still concerned with the accusation “that it [­poetry] is the mother of lies.” Original text: Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69375/the-defence-of-poesy; cited from Sebastian Neumeister, “­Renaissance und Barock: Themen am Beginn der Moderne,” in Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur (Berlin: Propyläen, 1988), vol. 3, 28. 45 See Mario Praz, Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik, 3rd ed. (Munich: DTV, 1988), 66–95. 46 Walter Rehm compares Gogol in this respect with Kierkegaard and Brentano (Rehm, Kierkegaard und der Verführer, 326–329). Susanne Fusso sees Schlegel’s concept of creativity as a possible source for the proximity of artist and liar in Dead Souls (Susanne Fusso, Designing Dead Souls. An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 47). As Dirk Uffelmann has perceptively observed, however, the explanation for Gogol’s difficulty in distinguishing aesthetic appearance from lie must probably be sought within the Russian intellectual tradition itself: “The religious philosophy dominant in Russia until the mid-twentieth century brought with it a decidedly non-critical (i.e. anti-Kantian) intellectual tradition that was antithetical to any conception of appearance as a neutral, nondemonic phenomenon, and hence to its differentiation on the one hand from nothingness and on the other from evil” (Dirk Uffelmann, “Mirazh/nebytie/zlo. Karriere einer Ligatur in der russischen onto-theologischen Philosophie,” in Mystifikation; Autorschaft; Original, ed. Susi Frank, Renate Lachmann, Sylvia Sasse, Schamma Schahadat, and Caroline Schramm [Tübingen: Narr, 2001], 43–44).

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Figure 10. Gogol’s letter to Zhukovsky on his translation of the Odyssey, fall 1849

4.  Gogol between Homer, Schiller, and Christianity When, in his later years, Gogol sought to convince his “ignorant brethren, who … play with life as if it were a game, that life is not a game,” he tended r­ epeatedly— as we already noted in the Introduction—to suffer from writer’s block. This shows how far the author of Dead Souls had moved from the Schillerian startingpoint of his aesthetics; for Schiller’s program of “aesthetic education” aimed precisely to promote the sense of play, which he took to be a fundamental human drive: “We know that in all conditions of humanity that very thing is play, and only that is play which makes man complete.” And: “Man … is only completely man when he plays.”47 For the late Gogol, on the other hand, homo ludens is given 47 Schiller, Schillers Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, 58–59. Gogol’s global condemnation of all “who play with life as if it were a game” might be seen as already implicit in Schiller’s warning against playing with “anything except beauty” (ibid., 59), but there is reason to doubt that the late

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over to the devil.48 All that is left of “aesthetic education” is the desire to improve one’s fellows and the hope to achieve this by means of “living examples,” whereas, for Schiller, the production of “living form” (that is, of art) depends uniquely on the ludic drive:49 without a delight in playing, everything—as Gogol bitterly complains of his own creative paralysis—may be “thought out and ready … but the hand does not take up the pen.” The roots of Gogol’s dwindling creativity can, then, be readily diagnosed with the conceptual tools provided by Schiller; but Schiller also played a part in the genesis of Gogol’s condition. For the mission the latter set himself, to bear the light of truth into a dark world, and his conviction that this could only succeed through a radical inward turn, along with his trust that he could best find what he sought in the distant past even at the cost of losing touch with his own age—all this is already present in essence in the Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. It is hard to believe Gogol would not have been affected by the sentiments expressed, for example, in the following passages of Schiller’s letter 9: Before truth has yet sent its victorious light into the depths of men’s hearts, the power of poetry catches its radiance, and the peaks of humanity begin to glow, while the valleys still lie in misty night. … The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary must fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is tottering. But it is important that it should not only totter in the external but also in the internal man. Cherish triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance. And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you have a good escort furnished by ideal nature. …

­ ogol was open to such subtle distinctions. Much suggests that any form of playing was susG pect to him. For the quote from Gogol, see p. 6. 48 Already in Book I of the Confessions (X.16) playfulness is condemned as the seed of moral depravity (Augustinus, Bekenntnisse, 44). 49 Schiller writes in the Briefe Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen: “The object of the play instinct, viewed in a general scheme, may be called vital form, a concept which describes all aesthetical qualities of phenomena and in a word what in the broadest sense one means by beauty” (Schiller, Schillers Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, 55).

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  No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he is its disciple or even its favorite. Let a beneficent deity carry off in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother, let it nourish him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to grow up and arrive at virility under the distant sky of Greece. When he has attained manhood, let him come back, presenting a face strange to his own age; let him come, not to delight it with his apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of Agamemnon.50 A comparison with a letter of Gogol’s dated 1847 is instructive: Inasmuch as I have concentrated on my own inner development, spending much time with the Bible, Moses and Homer, the lawgivers of times past, … and observed and charted the anatomy of my own soul with the purpose of gaining an altogether deeper insight into the soul of man, and in this way have encountered him that knows the human soul better than any other—to that extent I have naturally, for the time being, become a stranger to the present world.51 In their view of Ancient Greece, Gogol and Schiller differed radically. The ­German classicist adopted as sole landmark what for the Russian Romantic was one among many signposts on the way to Christ. On this however, they agreed, that the poet, returned from the introspective depths of the past and of his own soul, must set about cleansing his age. In a letter to the Prince of Schleswig‑­ Holstein dated 1793—a preliminary step (of which Gogol could have known nothing) toward his Letters on Aesthetic Education—Schiller hinted at the latent anti-poetic tendency of such a program: If this were to become fact—if the extraordinary event were to come about that political lawgiving should be entrusted to 50 Ibid., 31, 32, 30. 51 “[З]анявшись своим собственным внутренним воспитанием, проведя долгое время за Библией, за Моисеем, Гомером—законодателями веков минувших, … наконец, наблюдая и анатомируя собственную душу в желаньи узнать глубже душу человека вообще и встретясь на этом пути с тем, который более всех нас знал душу человека, я весьма естественно стал на время чужд всему современному” (letter to Pavel V. Annenkov, August 12, 1847; XIII, 362).

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r­ eason, man respected and treated as an end in himself, the law enthroned, and true freedom established as the foundation of the edifice of the state—then would I relinquish the Muses for ever and dedicate my entire activities to the greatest of all works of art, the monarchy of reason.52 Fascinated from his earliest years, and at the same time terrified, by the proximity between creativity and lying, Gogol would have imbibed from Schiller’s writings—in all likelihood his most important guide in aestheticis53—a twofold message. On the one hand he drew from this source the conviction that art can be a pathway to moral improvement. That much is clear. On the other hand, and less obviously, his secret delight in fabrication seems to have drawn nourishment from the same source, for he (albeit unconsciously) viewed the lie in the same perspective as Schiller did the naïve in poetry. And for Schiller the naïve par excellence was Homer. He is the great antipole against which the essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry sought to establish the raison d’être of the modern “sentimental”—that is, Schillerian—imagination. Gogol’s concern with Homer was in a sense analogous, for his Homer was in the first place the great predecessor and rival in the task of leaving to the people of his age a “complete and vital code of laws,”54 but at the same time he was the most eloquent advocate of lying in world literature. In the Odyssey Gogol found not only literary propaganda for his ethical ideal but also a trickster-hero who defied that ideal. And what might naturally cohabit in a “theology of malice” (Ricœur) must inevitably under the Christian cross fall into two opposite poles. Gogol’s attempt to build a bridge from Homer to Christ and make of the ancient apologist of deception a preChristian apostle of morality was bound to fail; the bridge would simply not reach the other bank. With his covert admiration for the art of lying—indeed for lying itself as an art-form—and his professed desire that art should purge his world of lying, Gogol lived a contradiction, and this broke him as an artist. Yet it is still worth considering the reverse possibility: that the insoluble tension 52 Letter to Prince Friedrich Christian von Schleswig‑Holstein‑Sonderburg‑Augustenburg, July 13, 1793 (in Jürgen Bolten, ed., Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung [Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1984], 40). 53 In this context one should also mention Kant, whose “Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen and Erhabenen” (Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime) Gogol had had partly to translate into Russian during his time at the Lyceum in Nezhin (Nizhyn)— the work had been available in Russian since 1814. Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education was in the final analysis a logical continuation of the Kantian notion of the beautiful as symbol of the morally good (see Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of judgment], §59). 54 See Chapter Two of the Introduction.

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under which Dead Souls in its full tripartite version inevitably collapsed was the very force that engendered the work as we have it. Does the first part of Dead Souls not owe its aesthetic compulsion to the bold—and in the final analysis irredeemable—plan to guide an Odysseus home by the light of Christian truth, to cure him, in the course of his wanderings, of lying? Chichikov and Odysseus—Gogol himself drew the comparison and was intent that his Odysseus should outdo the Homeric original in his leading characteristic: agility, cunning, inventiveness (Russian uvertlivost′). When Zhukovsky told him in 1849 that he had completed his translation of the Odyssey, Gogol replied: “The news that the Odyssey is finished and printed renders me speechless. That beast Chichikov has scarcely half his journey behind him—perhaps because a Russian hero among Russians must be so much nimbler than a Greek among Greeks.”55 And, as if to fend off any suspicion that he might consider such flexibility a virtue, he immediately adds: “And perhaps because the author of Dead Souls must be so much better in his soul than that beast Chichikov.”56 When he wrote this, Gogol had already completed an initial draft of the first chapter of Part Two of Dead Souls. His hero, then, was still hardly beyond the threshold of his Purgatorio, and the metamorphosis of “that beast Chichikov” into a redeemed sinner—which Gogol hoped would bring with it his own purification—lay on the distant horizon. Chichikov’s moral debility was only meant to reach crisis point toward the end of Part Two of the planned trilogy, so no more than the faintest hint of moral regeneration can be expected in Part One. If, however, there are grounds for seeing transgression of the Eighth Commandment as Chichikov’s cardinal vice, and if the further assumption holds that Gogol’s Inferno, like that of the Divina Commedia, entails a precise relation between individual crimes and their punishments, then we may well look for such a relation in the field of truth and lies and inquire whether in the figures of the five landowners Chichikov does not encounter five facets of a commerce with truth that is all too familiar to him from his own biography. The following chapter will scrutinize the five faces of that mirror in the order in which Gogol placed them on his character’s journey.

55 “Известие об оконченной и напечатанной ‘Одисее’ отняло язык. Скотина Чичиков едва добрался до половины своего странствования. Может быть, оттого, что русскому герою с русским народом нужно быть несравненно увертливей, нежели греческому с греками” (letter to Zhukovsky, Fall 1849 [XIV, 152]). 56 “Может быть, и оттого, что автору ‘Мерт д’ нужно быть гораздо лучше душой, нежели скотина Чичиков.”

CHAPTER 5

The Five Faces of Lying

To lie charmingly is also a sin. Czech proverb1

1. Manilov In relation to truth, Manilov and Sobakevich represent diametrical opposites: where one treats every word as a lie, the other is intoxicated by the mere sound of words without even asking about their meaning or truth.

a)  Manilovka, or the Realm of Euphemism What we have already seen of Manilov suggests that all he says obeys a categorical imperative to embellish and mollify its impact. Even his description of the way to his estate is a euphemism: “He shook his [Chichikov’s] hand for a very long time and begged him most convincingly to honor him by coming to his village, which, he said, was only some ten miles [orig.: fifteen verst] from the city limits.”2 After Chichikov has driven twenty miles without catching sight of Manilov’s estate, he remembers “that when a friend invites you to call on him in his village, only ten miles out of town, it means that it must certainly be twenty miles [orig.: thirty verst] distant.”3 Manilov’s ingrained habit of rhetorical amelioration is 1 “I pěkně lháti jest hřích” (František L. Čelakovský, Mudrosloví národu slovanského ve příslovích, 2nd ed., ed. Jan V. Novák [Prague: Hynek, 1893], 69). 2 “Он очень долго жал ему руку и просил убедительно сделать ему честь своим приездом в деревню, к которой, по его словам, было только пятнадцать верст от городской заставы” (VI, 17). 3 “Тут Чичиков вспомнил, что если приятель приглашает к себе в деревню за пятнадцать верст, то значит, что к ней есть верных тридцать” (VI, 22). The motif of friendship (­priiatel′) is linked here to the principle of euphemism.

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deeply rooted in eighteenth-century social convention. The adjective scattered obsessively throughout his small talk is priiatny (“pleasant”).4 It applies to everything: a person, a room, a conversation and its subject, time spent in the town, isolated life in the country, and public appearances.5 The only thing Manilov does not coat with an icing of saccharine epithets like prepochtenneishii (highly honorable), preliubezneishii (most delightful), or milyi (dear)6 is the human soul. He regards the object of Chichikov’s obscure desire as “so much trash”7—a judgment his guest immediately contradicts: “They are far from being trash.”8 Here, as with the other landowners, Chichikov’s offer immediately tests Manilov’s moral attitude and, in his case, what for a Christian is of the highest value is evidently meaningless. Appropriately enough, the church that once stood on his estate has been replaced with a heathen temple.9

b)  The First Face of the Lie—Rhetoric Without either of them noticing it, Chichikov’s project tests the very idea of truth cherished by his garrulous friend who, “bewitched by the apt phrase,”10 is plunged into embarrassment by his guest’s “fantastic whim” to purchase souls—goods that, as Manilov (again euphemistically) observes, “in a kind of way, have done with their existence.”11 The landowner can conceive of only one explanation: “Perhaps in this case … in the explanation which you have just now put forth … there is concealed something else … perhaps you were pleased to express yourself thus for the sake of a good style?”

  4 See Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 219–221; Mikhail Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia. Morfologiia. Ideologiia. Kontekst (Moscow: Radiks, 1993), 370.   5 “Приятно ли провели там время?” (VI, 27); “приятный человек” (VI, 28); “ничего не может быть прият­нее, как жить в уединеньи” (VI, 29); “приятный разговор”, “[п] риятная комнатка” (VI, 31); “приятность времени, проведенного с вами” (VI, 37); “рассуждать о каких‑нибудь приятных предметах”; “обворожают всех приятностию обращения” (VI, 39).   6 VI, 28.   7 “умершие души в некотором роде совершенная дрянь” (VI, 36).   8 “Очень не дрянь” (VI, 36).   9 “храм уединенного размышления” (VI, 22). See Lorenzo Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit im Schaffen von N.V. Gogol’ (Bern, Frankfurt, New York, and Paris: Lang, 1986), 187. 10 “обвороженный фразою” (VI, 146). 11 “фантастическое желание” (VI, 36); “души, которые в некотором роде окончили свое существование” (ibid.).

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  “No,” Chichikov caught him up, “no, I mean the matter to be taken just as it is—that is, I am referring to those souls who are now definitely dead.”   Manilov was utterly at a loss.12 On the surface, Manilov’s confusion is due to the unusual nature of Chichikov’s project, but there is a deeper concern here. The landowner could readily accept the idea that his guest was either speaking metaphorically—using a dictio impropria that “concealed something else”—or indulging in pure rhetorical extravagance “for the sake of a good style.” What the aesthete cannot grasp is the idea of an exact adaequatio rei et intellectus. Chichikov’s reply, “I mean [or “understand”: razumeou] the matter [or “object”: predmet] to be taken just as it is,” plays on Aquinas’s classical definition of truth.13 In Manilov, we may conclude, Gogol’s character encounters the lie in the garment of rhetoric.

c)  The Janitor of Hades Gogol’s skepticism toward rhetoric reflects a not infrequent attitude of the Church Fathers to the Greco-Roman heritage.14 This becomes evident when Gogol has the master of Manilovka outline his ideal of otium: “that it would really be a fine thing … in the shade of some elm or other … to philosophize about some subject or other, … to go in for something deep!”15 For classical antiquity, the elm was a tree of the underworld.16 Chichikov’s reply, “Oh, that would be living in paradise!”17 sets Manilov’s locus amoenus against the Christian horizon of redemption: his Garden of Eden is at the gateway to Hades. It is not a coincidence that this builder of castles in the air—his house also “stood 12 “‘… Может быть, здесь … в этом, вами сейчас выраженном изъяснении … скрыто другое. … Может быть, вы изволили выразиться так для красоты слога?’—‘Нет’,—подхватил Чичиков: ‘нет, я разумею предмет таков, как есть, то‑есть те души, которые точно уже умерли’. Манилов совершенно растерялся” (VI, 35). 13 See Quaestiones disputatae de veritate q. 1, a. 1; Summa theologica q. 16, a. 2 ad 2. Instead of the more usual verb ponimat′, Gogol uses razumet′, whose root refers directly to the faculty of reason (intellectus = razum). 14 The patristic critique of rhetoric propagated (following Plato) by Tatian, Gregory Nazianzen and Augustine, among others, was not directed against rhetoric in general but against a rhetoric divorced from the service of truth and elevated to the rank of a value in itself—that is, Manilovean rhetoric. 15 “как было бы в самом деле хорошо, … под тенью какого‑нибудь вяза пофилософство­вать о чем‑нибудь” (VI, 37). 16 See Der Kleine Pauly, vol. 5, col. 1041 (for English version see Brill’s New Pauly). 17 “О! это была бы райская жизнь!” (VI, 37; emphasis U.H.).

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… on an elevation, exposed to all the winds of heaven”18—is constantly preoccupied with construction projects, tunneling “an underground passage” here, a bridge across a river there.19 These mythologically charged images speak a clear language: Manilov, a man seemingly so bound up with this world, is already in spirit systematically preparing the transition to the underworld. In love with the mundane, he whiles his time snugly away on the border between the two realms, always with a complicit wink toward death.

d)  Manilov and Chichikov Within the wider ethical framework of Dead Souls, Manilov is no more than a reflection of Chichikov’s own attitude to truth. We have already touched on one of the images in this mirror, namely how the landowner’s overweening friendship is mirrored in his guest’s undisguised intention to clothe his lust for profit in a rhetorical gesture and “acquire the dead muzhiks through friendship rather than by purchase.”20 But this is only a beginning. On Chichikov’s lips Manilov’s euphemisms become the heartrending tale of his own prehistory; and it is a tale in which rhetoric celebrates in fulsome terms its symbolic triumph over truth: And really, what haven’t I endured? Like some bark or other, tossed amid the ferocious waves. … What oppressions, what persecutions have I not experienced, what woe have I not tasted of! And for what? For that I kept to the ways of righteousness [sobliudal pravdu], for that my conscience was clear, for that I ­extended the helping hand both to the homeless widow and to the poor, wretched orphan! …21 18 “Дом господский стоял одиночкой на юру, то‑есть на возвышении, открытом всем ветрам, каким только вздумается подуть” (VI, 22). Elena Smirnova sees this description as alluding to Dante’s depiction of the fortress in the first circle of the Inferno (canto IV, 106–119) and rightly points out Manilov’s affinity with the heroes of antiquity that populate limbo (Elena A. Smirnova, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi” [Leningrad: Nauka, 1987], 129). 19 See the two texts: “Иногда, глядя с крыльца на двор и на пруд, говорил он о том, как бы хорошо было, если бы вдруг от дома провести подземный ход или чрез пруд выстроить каменный мост” (VI, 25); and: “Он думал … о том, как бы хорошо было жить с другом на берегу какой‑нибудь реки, потом чрез эту реку начал строиться у него мост” (VI, 38). 20 See above, pp. 38 and 83. 21 “‘Да и действительно, чего не потерпел я? как барка какая‑нибудь среди свирепых волн. … Каких гонений, каких преследований не испытал, какого горя не вкусил, а за что? за то, что соблюдал правду, что был чист на своей совести, что подавал руку и вдовице беспомощной и сироте горемыке!’” (VI, 36–37; emphasis U.H.). Chichikov’s cynicism is

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Chichikov is not content merely to sell his earlier lying as love of truth; between the lines he winds the screw of distorted factuality yet another turn until it engenders of itself a higher truth, adorning his alleged righteousness with an image reserved in classical rhetoric for the craft of the poet. The bark as a symbol of poetry occurs archetypically in Canto Two of Dante’s Paradiso: O you, eager to hear more, who have followed in your little bark my ship that singing makes its way, turn back if you would see your shores again. Do not set forth upon the deep, for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.22 Quietly, stealthily, the author places on Chichikov’s lips an image that tells us his protagonist is a poet. Within the fiction, the reference remains lost, of course, to both speaker and listener: Chichikov’s education would hardly run to Dante, and, as for Manilov, we know that this rhetoric buff rarely gets beyond page 14 of any book.23 We have seen that within the system of cross-references in Dead Souls the Manilov chapter corresponds with the phase of Chichikov’s prehistory that brings it up to the fictional present. Here the narrator pauses to reflect on ­Chichikov’s character, and, significantly, he does so in terms that express a general feature of the epoch. We referred briefly to the relevant passage in the

intensified by his taking the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah into his mouth: the recurrent motif of the “widow” and the “fatherless” alludes to Is 1:17. Such brazenness demands retribution. The motif may also provide an explanation of Chichikov’s given name, Paul: the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul, whose Russian title alludes directly to Paul’s descensus ad inferos, speaks three times of the punishment of those who failed to “take mercy on widows and orphans” (Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung, vol. 2: Apostolisches, Apokalypsen und Verwandtes, 5th ed. [Tübingen: Mohr, 1989], 663, 664, 665). This Apocalypse was not only translated early into Russian (Khozhdenie apostola Pavla po mukam; Nikolai S. Tikhonravov, Pamiatniki otrechennoi russkoi literatury, vol. 2 [Moscow: Obshchestvennaia pol′za, 1863], 40–58); it also influenced Gogol’s main source of inspiration, the Divina Commedia (see idem, Sochineniia N. S. Tikhonravova, vol. 1: Drevniaia russkaia literatura [Moscow: Sabashnikovy, 1898], 204–206). Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 390f., offers an alternative explanation, suggesting a connection via Skovoroda. 22 “O voi che siete in piccioletta barca/ Desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti/ Dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,/ Tornate a riveder li vostri liti:/ Non vi mettete in pelago, chè forse,/ Perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti” (trans. Princeton Dante Project). The word barca (Russ. barka), used by both Gogol and Dante, is decisive. See Curtius’s chapter on nautical metaphors (Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, chap. 7, §1, 138–141). Susanne Fusso suggests Zhukovsky’s Plovets as another source of the bark image (Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 75). 23 See VI, 25.

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previous chapter; here, in the context of truth and lies, it is appropriate to quote it in extenso: That he [Chichikov] is not a character full of perfections and virtues is self-evident. What is he then? He must be a scoundrel, in that case. But why a scoundrel? After all, why be so severe toward others? There are no scoundrels among us nowadays: there are only well-intentioned, pleasant people. … True, there is about such a character a something actually repellent, and the very same reader who on the road he pursues through life will be friendly with a man like that, will gladly have him as a frequent guest at his hospitable board and will spend the time pleasantly with him, will start eyeing him askance if the same fellow turns up as the personage of a drama or an epic.24 To draw so ostentatiously on Manilovean vocabulary is to pronounce a devastating judgment on one’s contemporaries, who the narrator implicitly condemns as “so many Manilovs.”25 Even Sobakevich, who within his four walls stems himself against the euphemistic tide and has a good word for nobody, describes Chichikov to his wife, as they return from an evening at the Governor’s house, as “a most pleasant fellow” (prepriiatnyi chelovek; VI, 18). In a society that demands the categorical embellishment of evil, anyone who makes the “bitter truth” public will suffer for it.26 But “Who,” the narrator exclaims, “if not an author, is bound to tell the sacred truth?”27 In the name of the divine commandment, the poet is obligated to denounce the prevailing fog of manilovshchina. Yet Chichikov does the exact opposite, pandering not only to Manilov’s opinions but to those of the entire urban set: if he is a poet, then a highly corrupt one.

24 “Что он не герой, исполненный совершенств и добродетелей, это видно. Кто же он? стало быть, подлец? Почему ж подлец, зачем же быть так строгу к другим? Теперь у нас подлецов не бывает, есть люди благонамеренные, приятные. … Правда, в таком характере есть уже что-то отталкивающее, и тот же читатель, который на жизненной своей дороге будет дружен с таким человеком, будет водить с ним хлеб-соль и проводить приятно время, станет глядеть на него косо, если он очутится героем драмы или поэмы” (VI, 241–242; emphasis U.H.). 25 Gogol underlines this impression when he speaks in the following paragraph of “Manilov and all the other people” as synonymous with “the whole town [of N–]”: “он показался всему городу, Манилову и другим людям” (VI, 243). 26 “горькая правда” (VI, 243). 27 “Кто же, как не автор, должен сказать святую правду?” (VI, 245).

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Summing up, we can say that, in the first of the landowners, Chichikov encounters his own leaning toward sweet-talking concealment of his business interests. Manilov is the embodiment of a purely rhetorical understanding of language. The word, for him, is everything, an end in itself, reality a meaningless nothing. In ­Manilov’s realm what counts is the harmony of sounds; between sign and signified, between language and its real substratum, there is an unbridgeable differential. In light of the overall ethical concept of Dead Souls, it is of some relevance that Chichikov’s visit to Manilov is planned from the start. A world in which poetry rules fully over truth—a world of empty signs—offers heaven-sent ­opportunities to the purchaser of souls, dead or alive. And Manilov is, in fact, the only e­ state owner who not only offers Chichikov his souls “with no profit” (VI, 36), but even bears the cost of the purchase deed. It is revealing, too, that the landowner argues here exclusively in aesthetic categories. It is the fantasy of ­Chichikov’s project that grounds his assent; his own magnanimity, he makes haste to affirm, is bezynteresno (disinterested):28 “Since you have already gotten such a, so to say, fantastic whim, then for my part I assign them [the souls] to you without any financial interest in the matter.”29

2. Korobochka Left alone when Chichikov departs, Manilov gives himself up to his daydreams, conjuring wild fantasies of his own around the perspectives of their friendship. His guest, meanwhile, “tooling along a highroad” to his next assignment, yields contentedly to “the projects, calculations, and schemes” that “constituted the main object 28 Compare the formulation “disinterested satisfaction” in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (§2). Gogol’s schooling included certain aspects of Kant’s aesthetics, and his acquaintance Nadezhdin had studied the Critique more closely (see Susi K. Frank, Der Diskurs des Erhabenen bei Gogol’ und die longinische Tradition [Munich: Fink, 1999], 145). Although Gogol would hardly have read such a demanding philosophical work in its entirety, a key phrase like “disinterested satisfaction” would likely have come to his ears. There is a further literary-historical allusion hidden in Manilov’s reference to his own selfless generosity: Kant was one of the first authorities the sentimentalist Karamzin visited on his journey through Western Europe. See also Russell Scott Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 548 and 558. 29 “Если уж вам пришло этакое, так сказать, фантастическое желание, то, с своей стороны, я предаю их вам безынтересно и купчую беру на себя” (VI, 36). The Russian term bezynteresno has been a source of understandable difficulty for Gogol’s translators. In economic contexts interes means “profit,” “advantage,” “interest” (for example, on a loan). That Manilov waives his “interest” in this respect can be read as either foregoing all “financial interest” (Guerney) or merely as selling the souls “at no profit,” which would be an outright impertinence for nonexistent wares and would again unmask Manilov’s fulsome show of friendship.

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of his taste and inclinations,”30 namely business, and specifically the business of procuring souls. It looks, then, as if the ways of the two men would part here, the one into phantasms, the other toward his own coolly calculated economic reality. And this would doubtless have been Chichikov’s intention; but his host, whose name derives from the Russian verb manit′ (to lure), was not going to release him so readily, and instead of making his way as planned to Sobakevich, Chichikov, on leaving Manilovka, landed unexpectedly in Zamanilovka, the village of Korobochka.

Figure 11. Crabs lured by light out of their nocturnal hiding places Secrets revealed Out of dark caverns crabs, lured by clear light, As falsehood appear when truth comes about. 30 “А Чичиков в довольном расположении духа сидел в своей бричке, катившейся давно по столбовой дороге. Из предыдущей главы уже видно, в чем состоял главный предмет его вкуса и склонностей, а потому не диво, что он скоро погрузился весь в него и телом и душою. Предположения, сметы и соображения, блуждавшие по лицу его, видно, были очень приятны” (VI, 40).

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a)  From Manilovka to Zamanilovka Manilov and Korobochka, we are told, knew nothing of one another’s existence.31 However, a subtle pairing of images demonstrates that their estates are, in fact, strangely linked. As Chichikov drives into Manilov’s estate at the beginning of Chapter Two, he is confronted with the following scene: “The view was animated by two countrywives, who, with their gowns picturesquely hitched up and tucked in all around, were wading up to their knees in the pond, dragging by two wooden grapples a torn dragnet, wherein one could glimpse a couple of entangled crayfish.”32 And when, at the end of Chapter Three, he leaves Korobochka’s lands, a serf girl accompanies his equipage to show the driver the way: “Although the day was a very fine one, the ground had become miry to such a degree that … they were unable to get out of the maze of crossroads before noon. Without the little wench it would have been difficult to accomplish even this, inasmuch as the roads crept off in every direction, like a catch of crayfish when you dump them out of a sack.”33 The crayfish (or, more generally, the crab) has from ancient times been a symbol of versatility and cunning, and of the lie that shies the light34—all of them thoroughly Chichikovian attributes. In this perspective, the two digressions featuring these creatures, ostensibly inserted only for the sake of epic fullness, take on a deeper meaning, bracketing not only Chapters II and III into a narrative entity in their own right, but at the same time expressing what these chapters are really about. Like a crab in a net, Chichikov is caught in the meshes of a power from which he is helpless to disentangle himself. It now comes to light why, at the very entrance of Manilovka (literally, the seat of allurement), Zamanilovka (the village behind Manilovka) should be mentioned no less than five times:35 lured 31 See above, p. 81. 32 “Вид оживляли две бабы, которые, картинно подобравши платья и подтыкавшись со всех сторон, брели по колени в пруде, влача за два деревянные кляча изорванный бредень, где видны были два запутавшиеся рака” (VI, 23). 33 “Хотя день был очень хорош, но земля до такой степени загрязнилась, что … они не могли выбраться из проселков раньше полудня. Без девчонки было бы трудно сделать и это, потому что дороги расползались во все стороны, как пойманные раки, когда их высыпят из мешка” (VI, 60). 34 Gogol uses the word rak, which in a zoologically precise translation means “crayfish” (and which is the only word he could use in the given context, since crayfish live in rivers and ponds). But, as far as the idiomatic and symbolic value of the word is concerned, there is not much difference between “crayfish” and “crab.” See Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1967), s.v. “Krebs” (crab), esp. the Secreta revelat illustration (col. 723f.) reproduced as Fig. 11. 35 See the text from VI, 22 cited above, p. 81.

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by greed, the crab creeps ineluctably into the net in which it will be conveyed to its next destination. And Chichikov’s journey to Korobochka is indeed reminiscent of the fate of some watery creature at the bottom of a fisherman’s sack: lost, wet, and caked in mud, he only comes to rest when his plunge through the darkness collides with the boundary of Korobochka’s estate: “Selifan, without seeing a thing, set his horses in such a straight line for the village that he stopped only when the shafts of the carriage ran right up against a fence and there was absolutely nowhere else to drive.”36 Next morning, when Chichikov looks out of the window of his new abode, he sees nets hanging everywhere: “Apple trees and other fruit trees were scattered here and there over the gardens; these trees were covered over with nets as a protection against the magpies and sparrows.”37 Once caught, the crab entangles itself more helplessly with every movement in the meshes of the net: we will see later how little all Chichikov’s wiles help him in his dealings with Korobochka. Without her help in the form of a serving wench he would never have found his way out of the property. But he is still by no means free. The little girl Pelageia accompanies him and his coachman to the next inn, where an encounter with Nozdrev awaits him. And if her name means anything (from pelagos, the sea), Gogol is telling us that Chichikov/Odysseus is once more being swept onto the oceans.38 It will be a long time before he has terra firma under his feet: on Nozdrev’s estate he finds himself literally wading through water.39 “… as for Zamanilovka, there ain’t no such place whatsoever.”40 The muzhik’s assertion can be taken to mean that behind Manilovka there is nothing pure and simple—empty nothingness.41 That Korobochka’s estate is situated in a strange no-man’s-land has already been noted,42 and her arrival in the town of N–in Chapter Eight will elicit from the sentry, woken by the creaking of her carriage, the reassurance that, after all, “no one was going there.”43 But if her kingdom 36 “Селифан, не видя ни зги, направил лошадей так прямо на деревню, что остановился тогда только, когда бричка ударилася оглоблями в забор и когда решительно уже некуда было ехать” (VI, 43). 37 “По огороду были разбросаны кое‑где яблони и другие фруктовые деревья, накрытые сетями для защиты от сорок и воробьев” (VI, 48). 38 James B. Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 84, sees the girl’s pelagic name as alluding ironically—given her status as a serf—to the Romantic ideal of freedom, now lost. However, the Odyssey is a less constrained, and hence more convincing, source for the allusion. 39 See the text from VI, 74 cited below, p. 139. 40 “Заманиловки совсем нет никакой” (VI, 22). 41 See Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 57. 42 See the remarks in the previous chapter, p. 81; see also Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 222. 43 “Шум и визг … разбудили на другом конце города будочника, который, подняв свою алебарду, закричал спросонья что стало мочи ‘кто идет?’, но, увидев, что никто не шел …,

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is not of this world, where is it located? Gogol drops a number of hints that allow us to surmise its coordinates. The most important of these we shall now examine.

b)  Mistress of Hades The sign under which Chichikov’s path from Manilov to Korobochka stands is suggested in the bracketing of the double episode with the image of the crab (or, in Guerney’s translation, crayfish): the zodiacal emblem cancer, which for the Greeks marked the entrance to “the nether half of the heavens.”44 And in fact the traveler had scarcely crossed the old woman’s threshold when he was overtaken by tiredness; his eyelids stuck together “as if somebody had smeared them with honey”—a classic funerary gift.45 And, while he slept, flies perched on his face as if he were dead: “[O]ne perched on his upper lip, another on his ear, a third was maneuvering to settle on his very eye; as for one that had been incautious enough to squat near a nostril, he, being half asleep, drew it up his nose, which made him sneeze hard, a circumstance that was the cause of his awakening.”46 опять заснул, по уставам своего рыцарства” (VI, 176; emphasis U.H.). The text inevitably recalls Odysseus’s “Nobody” lie. 44 Karl Kerényi, Die Mythologie der Griechen, 4th ed. [Munich: DTV, 1979], vol. 2, 119. This in no way conflicts with the occasional function of the crab as a symbol of resurrection. As Friedrich Ohly has observed of medieval symbols, their spectrum of reference “reaches from God to the devil and adheres potentially to any named object; it is actualized through the specific context and property in question” (Friedrich Ohly, Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977], 9–10). As a figure planned to undergo every stage from Inferno to Paradiso, Chichikov anyway attracts symbolic ambivalence: Gogol would either have had to drop the symbols associated with his character in Part One of Dead Souls or to reinterpret them on the way through Parts Two and Three. 45 “Он чувствовал, что глаза его липнули, как будто их кто‑нибудь вымазал медом” (VI, 45). For the honey offering for Hades and Persephone see Aeneid 4:486 and 6:420; for honey as a grave-gift see Iliad 23:170; Odyssey 10:519 and 24:68. For the Slavic area see Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns Bächthold-Stäubli (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1987), vol. 4, col. 296. 46 “[О]дна села ему на губу, другая на ухо, третья норовила как бы усесться на самый глаз, ту же, которая имела неосторожность подсесть близко к носовой ноздре, он потянул впросонках в самый нос, что заставило его очень крепко чихнуть—обстоятельство, бывшее причиною его пробуждения” (VI, 47). The resemblance between Chichikov’s sleep and that of death lies above all in the flies settling on his eyes and nostrils. In the ritual of exorcism the devil typically exits in the form of a fly from the nostrils of the possessed person (see Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 1, col. 1152). In this light, Woodward’s attempt (Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 98) to associate the fly—a classically Satanic creature—with purity of soul seems somewhat capricious.

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When he finally rose—as if sunken in Lethe—he could not at first remember his hostess’s face;47 and when later, after his negotiations, he returned to the parlor where he had spent the night, he was “all in a sweat, as if he were swimming in a river of it.”48 On entering Korobochka’s realm he had been greeted by a chorus of hounds;49 on leaving, he pays his young guide the hallowed obolos for Charon’s services, a “copper coin.”50 When his arrival is announced, the mistress of the house sends two women, one after the other and one much like the other, to receive him: only the third face she shows is her real countenance.51 When her clock strikes, it is “as if the whole room had become filled with serpents”;52 and on her walls, with their “poor striped wallpaper,” hang “pictures, showing some nondescript birds,”53 an image that reminded Woodward, for one, of incarcerated souls.54 Taken together, the current of references is overwhelming: Korobochka (whose given name, Nastasya, denotes the resurrection of the dead) keeps souls imprisoned in her kingdom; she puts her guest into a temporarily deathlike state; and she herself possesses central attributes of Hecate—the baying of hounds, the hissing of serpents, the threefold face.55 Other characteristic

47 “Он стал припоминать себе: кто бы это был, и наконец вспомнил, что это была хозяйка” (VI, 47–48). 48 “чувствовал, что был весь в поту, как в реке” (VI, 55). 49 See VI, 44. Elena Smirnova points up the parallels to Canto VI of Dante’s Inferno (Smirnova, Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi,” 131). 50 “Чичиков дал ей медный грош” (VI, 60). 51 See VI, 45. 52 VI, 45; for Russian text see note 167 on page 79. Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit, 176, interprets the serpents in the traditional Christian sense as an image of evil, but overlooks Gogol’s emphatic intertwining here of the motif of the striking clock, a sign recalling the transience of life. 53 “комната была обвешана старенькими полосатыми обоями; картины с какими‑то птицами” (VI, 45). On the bird as symbol of the soul see Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 8, col. 1676. 54 See Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 83 and 96. Gudrun Langer, “Pandoras Töchter. Überlegungen zur Konzeption des ‘schönen Übels’ (‘kalòn kakón’) im Werk Gogol’s,” Specimina Philologiae Slavicae 117: Slavische Sprachwissenschaft und Interdisziplinarität, no. 4 (1998): 157, on the other hand, compares the birds with the evils flying out of Pandora’s Box—a reading that calls for completion in terms of the unmistakable connotations of Hades relating to the figure of Korobochka. 55 See Kerényi, Die Mythologie der Griechen, vol. 2, 40–41; Robert von Ranke‑Graves, Griechische Mythologie. Quellen und Deutung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1960), vol. 1, 101. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Hecate is the “three-formed goddess” (bk. 7, 94 f., 177). Gogol explicitly refers to this text in the Korobochka chapter (VI, 50). Karl Philipp Moritz writes of Hecate: “she is one of the secret beings of the night whose powers have a wide compass. At the same time she is a goddess of fate in whose hands lie the destinies of man” (Karl Philipp Moritz, Götterlehre oder mythologische Dichtungen der Alten, 4th ed. [Berlin: Schade, 1816], 44)—a role that largely fits that of Korobochka in Dead Souls.

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features—the apple orchard, the hens, and the chick-devouring sow—recall the Russian fairytale witch Baba Yaga.56 But there is no real conflict here, for that figure, too, is mistress of the underworld, and as such mythically related to Hecate.57 In either case, Chichikov is confronted with a chthonic female deity. A more substantial contradiction with these figures of the pagan underworld adheres to Korobochka’s ostensibly Christian attributes, until one realizes that these arise purely from superstitious fear of punishment by the Christian God.58 Two examples may suffice: the candle that burns before her icon protects the house from thunderstorms (VI, 46), and she dreams of the devil at night because after her evening prayers she “got a notion … of telling fortunes by cards” (VI, 54). Her relations with the official church are similarly two-sided. Father Kiril, the Archpriest, whose friendship she evidently cultivates, personifies a trinity of questionable values: he buys serf-girls from Korobochka, his wife is a fount of local gossip, and his son works in the Administrative Offices, a center of corruption furnished by the narrator with all the characteristics of a heathen temple.59

56 See Marie‑Luise von Franz: “Das Problem des Bösen im Märchen,” in Marie‑Luise von Franz et al., Das Böse (Zürich and Stuttgart: Rascher, 1961), 91–126, here 100; Richarda Becker, Die weibliche Initiation im ostslawischen Zaubermärchen. Ein Beitrag zur Funktion und Symbolik des weiblichen Aspektes im Märchen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Figur der Baba Jaga (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), 125. As chthonic creatures, birds and snakes are related to Baba Yaga (see the chapter “Die Muttergöttin als ‘Herrin der Tiere’,” ibid., 129–134). On Korobochka as Baba Yaga see Andrej Sinjawskij, Im Schatten Gogols, trans. S. Geier (Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna: Propyläen, 1979), 301f.; Ezhi Farino, “Struktura poezdki Chichikova,” Russian Literature 7 (1979): 615f.; Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 372. 57 See Becker, Die weibliche Initiation, 121, 155. 58 Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit, 175, who closely examines Korobochka’s religious sentiments, also comes to the conclusion “that she does not really believe in the power of the Cross, which she so readily invokes.” It may be noted in this context that, although the name of God is often mentioned in the Korobochka chapter, Gogol carefully avoids mention of Christ. Chichikov’s arrival at the widow’s estate was originally to be accompanied by the exclamatory prayer “слава те Христос, что всего только засалился, что не отломал себе боков” (VI, 717), but Gogol changed this to “Еще слава богу, что только засалился; нужно благодарить, что не отломал совсем боков” (VI, 46). On the issue of religion, Ekaterina S. Smirnova-Chikina, Poema N. V. Gogolia “Mertvye dushi.” Literaturnyi kommentarii (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1964), 71—in opposition to the Academy Edition commentary (VI, 893)—maintains that Gogol intended a future new edition of Dead Souls to mention the well-kept church on Korobochka’s estate. This would, however, have contradicted the principle—pointedly formulated by Vsevolod Setschkareff, N. V. Gogol’. Leben und Schaffen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1953), 142—that Part One of the work should contain “not a single word” about religion. That this principle does not quite hold throughout the Inferno of the planned trilogy—Pliushkin is the exception, with not one but two churches on his estate—will be commented in the relevant section. 59 See VI, 52 (on Fr. Kyril), 55 (on his son) and 183 (on his wife); on the depiction of the Administrative Offices as a heathen temple see Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit, 186–188.

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The dealer in souls has, then, without realizing it, landed in Hades—and we can note en passant that the wicket gate through which Gogol has him stagger to peals of thunder60 marks the end of the essentially public world. Manilov’s ideal was the mondaine comme il faut, whose empty phrases hid a deep yen for the underworld. His realm marks the door to Hades, of which he himself is the gatekeeper. The dwellers in that world, the “shades,” may waken momentarily as in the Odyssey, but then “only to consciousness and speech, not to any sort of action or prolongation of life.”61 As such, their ontological status resembles that of literary figures62—and the singularly fictive aspect of Korobochka’s realm has already been noted in the previous chapter. We may conclude, then, that in this chapter Gogol combines markers of the fictional with elements of the classical descensus myth.63 Even if—on the model of the Divina Commedia—he conceived Part One of his epic in its entirety as a “descent into hell,” he was evidently reluctant to dispense with the traditional nekyia, the passage of his character into the fiction’s specific underworld; and this change in levels of reality has implications for the idea of truth at work in Chapter Three of Dead Souls.

c)  The Second Face of the Lie—Magic We have observed above that in Chapter Three the bizarre originality of his plan, which Chichikov advertises in Chapter Eleven as its great selling point, almost proves his undoing, when Korobochka’s inability to grasp the nature of his business proposition leads first to her rejecting it out of hand and then to her making it public. What the old lady—to Chichikov’s growing dismay—fails to understand is the difference between fiction and reality, between the order of names and the order of what they name. That something expressed in language need not exist realiter exceeds her comprehension.64 Her reactions to her guest’s offer 60 “Наконец громовой удар раздался в другой раз громче и ближе, и дождь хлынул вдруг, как из ведра” (VI, 41). 61 Walter F. Otto, Theophania. Der Geist der altgriechischen Religion (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 56. 62 Otto puts it aptly: “theirs is the being of those who have been” (ibid.); literary art is also in its origins the art of memory (see Renate Lachmann, Gedächtnis und Literatur. Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne [Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1990]). 63 It may be noted here that the episode of Chichikov’s prehistory corresponding with the Korobochka chapter explicity thematizes the references to Greek antiquity in the form of the provinces of Kherson (Cherson) and Tauris where he intended to settle his dead souls. 64 Morson puts it succinctly: “Nothing can convince her that nothing is nothing” (“Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics,” in Essays on Gogol. Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso, and Priscilla Meyer [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992], 200–239, here 211).

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when she thinks he wants to dig the dead out of their graves,65 when she hopes they might be of some use again on the estate,66 when Chichikov has to explain twice that the transfer of the souls will only take place on paper,67 are no more than the reverse side of her angst-ridden superstition. She believes in, and hence fears, the power of words to engender concrete realities; significantly, the only means with which Chichikov can impress her is a curse: At this juncture, Chichikov lost every last shred of patience, picked up his chair, banged it down in exasperation, and hoped the Devil would take her.   The landed proprietress became inordinately frightened of the Devil. “Oh, never mention him. God be with him!” she cried, turning all pale. …   “Oh, what dreadful curses to be wishing anybody!” said the old woman, looking at him with fear.68 That Korobochka is incapable of distinguishing between the verbal and the real does not prevent her from a surprisingly open display of skepticism and ­suspicion—at first sight, perhaps, her predominant characteristic69—combined (in contrast to Sobakevich or Pliushkin) with a paradoxical trust. Thus with equal openness she admits to Chichikov that she is afraid he will cheat her70 or abduct her serf-girl71 and tells him, had he actually been the tax assessor she initially took him for, she would have attempted to bribe and overcharge him.72 And she regrets volubly that she sold her honey so cheaply to the merchants

65 VI, 51; for Russian text see note 159 on p. 78. 66 VI, 53; for Russian text see note 24 on p. 38. 67 VI, 51, 54; for Russian text see note 23 on p. 38. 68 “Здесь Чичиков вышел совершенно из границ всякого терпения, хватил всердцах стулом об пол и посулил ей чорта. Чорта помещица испугалась необыкновенно. ‘Ох, не припоминай его, бог с ним!’—вскрикнула она, вся побледнев. … ‘Ах, какие ты забранки пригинаешь!’—сказала старуха, глядя на него со страхом” (VI, 54). Simon Karlinsky astutely notes that the “concept of the word as a magical spell or incantation … is very much present both in Gogol’s work and in his general mentality” (Simon Karlinsky, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton, with Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures,” California Slavic Studies 5 [1970]: 172). Curiously, among his examples taken from Dead Souls, Korobochka is missing. 69 See Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, “Nikolaj Gogol: Die toten Seelen,” in Der russische Roman, ed. Bodo Zelinsky (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1979), 93, 103. 70 “может быть, ты, отец мой, меня обманываешь” (VI, 52). 71 “только ты, смотри! незавези ее, у меня уже одну завезли купцы” (VI, 58). 72 See above, p. 78.

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when she could have sold it at a higher price to her guest.73 Korobochka, in fact, wears her heart on her sleeve, a quality scarcely compatible with mistrust. In contrast with both Sobakevich and Pliushkin, her words are not instruments for the concealment of truth but for its—perhaps unintentional—revelation. On her lips, names and things tend so to coincide that the name gains a certain power over the thing—hence her inveterate superstition.

d)  Korobochka and Chichikov Given the significance of words in Korobochka’s world, it is not surprising that a certain rivalry develops between her and her guest around the prerogative of naming. Robert Maguire has noted this with regard to the old lady,74 who immediately classifies her unknown visitor as a “tax assessor” and, when he rejects this label, has the next one directly to hand: “And what’s your name?” asked the landed proprietress. “Why, you must be a tax assessor, I guess?”   “No, mother!” Chichikov answered with a smile. “I guess I’m no assessor, but just traveling on my own little business affairs.”   “Ah, so you’re a commission buyer!”75 Chichikov reacts most defensively to this onslaught of definitions; on first setting foot on her property, he had been careful not to reveal his name. His reply to the serving woman’s justified inquiry as to his identity had been “We’ve just come, mother; let us stay the night,” and when she again asks “But who might you be?” he answers noncommittally “I am of the gentry, mother.”76 Next 73 VI, 50; for Russian text see note 75. Chichikov later learns that Korobochka has sold her honey at an exorbitant price (“‘По 12‑ти руб. пуд’.—‘Хватили немножко греха на душу, матушка. По двенадцати не продали’” [VI, 53]). 74 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 223; as will become apparent below, Maguire’s conclusion (ibid., 224) that Gogol approves of Korobochka’s procedure is, however, less than convincing. A detail Maguire overlooks is that Korobochka lists her dead serfs “almost to a man [with] supplemental qualifications and nicknames” (“все почти были с придатками и прозвищами”; VI, 136, emphasis U.H.). 75 “‘А ваше имя как?’—спросила помещица. ‘Ведь вы, я чай, заседатель?’—‘Нет, матушка’,— отвечал Чичиков усмехнувшись: ‘чай не заседатель, а так ездим по своим делишкам’.—‘А , так вы покупщик! Как же жаль, право, что я продала мед купцам так дешево, а вот ты бы, отец мой, у меня, верно, его купил’” (VI, 50). 76 “‘Приезжие, матушка, пусти переночевать’,—произнес Чичиков. … ‘Да, кто вы такой?’— сказала старуха. ‘Дворянин, матушка’” (VI, 44).

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­ orning the game is repeated in the terms just quoted. Chichikov’s defensivem ness is symptomatic of his relations with Korobochka: in her presence his otherwise sovereign mastery over words deserts him. His sophistry simply rebounds, and does so in such a way that he is forced to realize that in the old lady he has met not only a mistress of his own rhetorical discipline, but his mistress. The narrator comments: “it was in vain that Chichikov was getting worked up about her: at times you’ll come across a man that is highly respected and is even in the government’s employ, yet when it comes down to doing business with him, he will turn out to be a perfect Korobochka. … no matter how many arguments that are as clear as day you may present to him, they will bounce off him the way a rubber ball bounces off a wall.”77 In Part Two of Dead Souls Gogol applies the same image to Chichikov: “Upon ending his speech, the guest with enchanting grace drew one leg to the other and lightly clicking the heels of his elegant mother-ofpearl buttoned patent leather half-boots, sprang, for all his corpulence, with the ease of a rubber ball, slightly back.”78 Characteristic of the difficulties in which Korobochka lands him is his exclamation “Why, one can’t find words … for you!”—probably the only place in the entire novel where Chichikov is seriously lost for words.79 That, faced with this adversary, the most finely gauged eloquence turns to dust is apparent again in Chapter Eight, when even the narrator is struck with a singular aphasia in describing Korobochka’s entrance to the town of N–: her carriage—for which he tries out (and rejects) the terms ekipazh, tarantas, koliaska, and brichka—“made one wonder what name one could give it.”80 What, then, does Chichikov’s second visit tell us about truth and lies? Korobochka’s domain is evidently not of this world. Entering it, Chichikov unknowingly sets foot on precisely that terra incognita toward which his quest impels him: the kingdom of the dead. In Korobochka he is confronted with a goddess

77 “Впрочем, Чичиков напрасно сердился: иной и почтенный, и государственный даже человек, а на деле выходит совершенная Коробочка …; сколько ни представляй ему доводов, ясных, как день, всё отскакивает от него, как резинный мяч отскакивает от стены” (VI, 53). 78 “Окончив речь, гость с обворожительной приятностью подшаркнул ногой, обутой в щегольской лаковый полусапожек, застегнутый на перламутные пуговки, и, несмотря на полноту корпуса, отпрыгнул тут же несколько назад с легкостью резинного мячика” (VII, 27). 79 “Да не найдешь слов с вами!” (VI, 54). 80 “недоумение насчет своего названия” (VI, 176; Guerney translates the last three attempts to name this “quite odd vehicle” as “tarantass, … calash, … light covered carriage”; Dead Souls, chap. 7, 173).

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of that underworld, identified by multiple insignia: a ruler over “airy nothings,”81 which in the world above are recalled or designated by a name, but in her realm, when named, appear in form and substance (one thinks of the nekyia of Odysseus). Against this background the tendency of the superstitious old widow to treat the symbolic as real and endow words with power over things loses its puzzling quality. The name, for Korobochka, creates reality out of nothing; fearing this immediate power, she demands sole authority over it. Chichikov’s plan to reanimate the dead simply by listing their names relies on the same principle. He uses the fact that the name both designates and outlives us—and thus in a certain sense transcends us—as a trick for the seeming re-creation of human souls. With nothing but a name he draws value from nothingness: Chichikovo, the village he aims to found in the province of Kherson, is a realm of shades. The goddess cannot suffer such competition.

3. Nozdrev82 The reconstruction of the ground plan of Dead Souls in Part One of this study ­already revealed a functional relation between Korobochka and Nozdrev; preceding sections have also highlighted the connection between the “landed proprietress” and Manilov. The complementary quality of these two aspects can emerge, however, only in light of our current concern with the issue of truth and lies. Only in this perspective does the thread joining the three landowners become visible: the line of Chichikov’s fate as conman and swindler spun by Manilov, handed on to Korobochka, and tied into a final tragic knot by Nozdrev. But before—in a concluding chapter to this part of the study—we can view this unholy trinity as a coherent whole, we must first examine the underlying structural connections between Korobochka and Nozdrev; we will then chart Nozdrev’s position within the field of truth and lies, and finally determine his role in the overall structure of the novel—which means, above all, his significance for Chichikov.

a)  From Zamanilovka to Nozdrev Korobochka acts at crucial moments hand in hand with Nozdrev: through the servant-girl Pelageia she drives Chichikov virtually into his arms, and together 81 See Odyssey, 10:521, 536 and 11:29, 49. 82 On Nozdrev in general see Fusso’s chapter “Lying as a Type of Inspiration” (Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 43–48).

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with him she engineers Chichikov’s fall in public esteem and ensuing flight. Other features that indicate their closeness are the fact that they are the only two landowners Chichikov encounters involuntarily, and also the only ones with whom he stays the night—it is only consistent, then, that his fate should be sealed at night.83 Moreover, Nozdrev and Korobochka alone experience the otherwise tireless traveler on the verge of exhaustion. We have already seen the insuperably drowsy Chichikov on his arrival at Korobochka’s; in his tour of Nozdrev’s property he was also “beginning to feel fatigue”;84 and after Nozdrev’s fatal appearance at the Governor’s ball his somnolence assumes existentially threatening dimensions: a person whose whole being is based on carriages, chests, and inns becomes suddenly travel-weary: “he looked like a man fatigued or broken up by a prolonged trip.”85 It fits this general picture that only Nozdrev and Korobochka cause this cleanliness-obsessed, soap-loving pretender to sweat—a circumstance whose unpleasant effect on him was already emphasized in the Manilov episode, when Chichikov “being quite a sensitive man,” complained to his servant Petrushka: “The Devil alone knows what you’re up to, brother; you’re sweating or something.”86 And the very dirt into which he falls at Korobochka’s gate still clings to him as Nozdrev shows his visitors around his possessions: They had to make their way between fallow lands and furrowed corn fields. … In many places their feet made water spurt forth, so low-lying was this bog. At first they were cautious and set their feet down with care, but then, seeing that this was of no use, they sloshed right on, without choosing between the deeper or the shallower mud [griaz′ = dirt].87

83 In a work of Romanticism whose title already contains the word soul, any nocturnal emphasis is ipso facto significant. Susanne Fusso even postulates Edward Young’s Night Thoughts as a key source for the overall concept of Dead Souls (Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 103–104). On the general significance of the night for Russian Romanticism, see Bodo Zelinsky, Russische Romantik [Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1975], 84–92 and passim. 84 “Чичиков начинал чувствовать усталость” (VI, 74). 85 “Он был похож на какого‑то человека, уставшего или разбитого дальней дорогой” (VI, 174). 86 “ты, брат, чорт тебя знает, потеешь, что ли” (VI, 20). 87 “Гости должны были пробираться между перелогами и взбороненными нивами. Чичиков начинал чувствовать усталость. Во многих местах ноги их выдавливали под собою воду, до такой степени место было низко. Сначала они было береглись и переступали осторожно, но потом, увидя, что это ни к чему не служит, брели прямо, не разбирая, где большая, а где меньшая грязь” (VI, 74).

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Finally, at the height of the Governor’s ball, Nozdrev lands Chichikov in the situation of one who metaphorically “set[s] a beautifully polished boot into a filthy, stinking puddle” (emphasis U.H.).88 Beneath the surface, then, there are more parallels between these two landowners, the bragging transgressor and the worrying dowager, than their contrasting appearances might suggest. But what of Korobochka’s Hecatean dimension? Does Nozdrev’s role in the novel offer any analogy with her status in the underworld?

b)  The Spirit that Denies The topography of his estate already suggests that it does: Nozdrev’s land is ­extremely low-lying, and if Part One of Dead Souls is intended to parallel Dante’s Inferno, this is its profoundest depths. Contrary to Bely’s conjecture, the novel’s deep-point occurs not in Chapter Six but—as will be shown—here in Chapter Four.89 But there is another point of contact between the two landowners, and one that has so far been scarcely mentioned: they are the only ones to keep dogs. While Korobochka’s pack—as befits the mistress of Hades—guard only the threshold of her realm, in Nozdrev’s case the dogs are full members of the household, more privileged, indeed, than the master’s own offspring: “Nozdrev in their midst was absolutely like a father in the midst of his family.”90 In his territory, where all else is either unfulfilled promise (the wolf whelp, the perfectly marked deck-to-be of cards) or the ruin of a better past (the mill, the hurdygurdy, the carriage),91 the dogs represent the only real present value—“and,” the narrator confirms, “good dogs they were, too.”92 They evidently constitute the attribute of Nozdrev over which time holds least sway: substance, not accidents, they are what he most is. 88 “он стал чувствовать себя неловко, неладно: точь‑в‑точь как будто прекрасно вычищен­ ным сапогом вступил вдруг в грязную, вонючую лужу” (VI, 173). The internal connection with the passage just cited is even clearer at an earlier manuscript stage: “Чичиков, который ступал сначала осторожно, чтобы не загрязнить своих сапогов, наконец, увидел, что это ни к чему не служит, и брёл прямо” (VI, 731; emphasis U.H.). 89 This will be commented in greater detail below, in the section “From Nozdrev to Sobakevich” (p. 155). 90 “Ноздрев был среди их совершенно как отец среди семейства” (VI, 73, compare VI, 70). 91 See also Wolfgang Schmidbauer, Alles oder nichts. Über die Destruktivität von Idealen, 2nd rev. ed. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1987), 352: the “‘Not yet–no longer’ principle”—in which “the middle aspect of here-and-now is missing and life centers on the future and the past”—embodies a temporal relation that is “an aspect of the destructive ideal.” 92 “Осмотрели собак, наводивших изумление крепостью черных мясов,—хорошие были собаки” (VI, 73).

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With the dogs Nozdrev shares a passion for the chase. His repeated designation as okhotnik (hunter) has already been noted; but Gogol, pace Woodward,93 is more interested in the diabolical than the masculine connotations of this pastime: the devil as hunter is an ancient trope.94 In the form of a dog he is familiar, for example, from Goethe’s Faust: “Dog, loathsome monster! … Don’t bare your greedy teeth like that at me!” Faust cries when his once black poodle95 appears in the form of a red-jerkined devil (and in the corresponding episode of the prehistory Gogol originally compared Chichikov with a poodle).96 Nozdrev is portrayed by the narrator in the classical hues of hell: “of a dark complexion … with full rosy cheeks, teeth as white as snow, and side whiskers as black as pitch”; even, a little later, with a face “blazing as if it were actually on fire.”97 Other symbolic images complete the picture: a goat, which appears “perfectly at home” on Nozdrev’s terrain;98 the aforementioned wolf whelp, kept on a tether, intended, it seems, for an apocalyptic future as a “perfect brute”;99 a smithy—which in contrast with most other technical furnishings on the estate seems in no way defective100—and finally a circle of friends with names like Khvostyrev (“well-pricked”) or Kuvshinnikov (“foul-faced”) that scarcely

 93 Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 41.  94 Originally a Germanic-heathen feature, hunting was soon assimilated to the Christian devil (see Günther Mahal, Mephistos Metamorphosen. Fausts Partner als Repräsentant literarischer Teufelsgestaltung [Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1972], 125).  95 Faust I, ll. 1147, 1536 in the scene titled “Gloomy Day. A Field.” It might be added that in Goethe’s time the poodle was not the pet of elderly ladies we know today, but a hunting dog. The name Pudel—deriving from a dialect form of Pfuhl (pool or bog)—itself suggests an affinity with Nozdrev’s terrain.  96 “‘Ну, что ж’,—сказал наш герой, встряхнувшись, как пудель, которого облили водою” (VI, 686).  97 See the following two passages: “вошел чернявый его товарищ, … молодцевато взъерошив рукой свои черные густые волосы. Это был среднего роста, очень недурно сложенный молодец с полными румяными щеками, с белыми, как снег, зубами и черными, как смоль, бакенбардами” (VI, 64) and “‘Так ты не хочешь доканчивать партии?’—повторил Ноздрев с лицом, горевшим, как в огне” (VI, 86). Dostoevsky took up and further developed the teeth symbol as a feature of the devil in Demons.  98 “В этой конюшне видели козла, которого, по старому поверью, почитали необходимым держать при лощадях, который, как казалось, был с ними в ладу, гулял под их брюхами, как у себя дома” (VI, 73).  99 Nozdrev comments on the wolf cub: “Мне хочется, чтобы он был совершенным зверем!” (VI, 73). His choice of words (zver′) alludes to the Book of Revelation. 100 See VI, 74. The blacksmith-devil relation is—also in Gogol’s work—ambivalent. While in “Christmas Eve” the smith makes a mockery of evil, Korobochka’s drunken smith in Dead Souls burns himself up in a “small blue flame”—a clear sign of demonic possession. For “smith” see Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, vol. 9, Supplement, col. 257–267; for the devil exiting in a “blue cloud” see ibid., vol. 1, col. 1152.

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bear contemplation.101 The dogs, for their part, are named with nouns and imperatives in which the fires of hell veritably crackle: Pozhar, Dopekai, Pripekai (“Fire, Bully, Get Hot […]”)—one of them was originally even to be called Zmeika (“little snake”).102 Closer to Nozdrev’s essence are a series of satanic attributes like his infernal laugh,103 his random, utterly contingent actions, his concomitant obsession with games of chance,104 and his ability to translocate,105 coupled, behind various masks, with mundane omnipresence: “He is everywhere in our midst,” the narrator observes, “perhaps merely walking about in a coat of a different cut. …”106 In this light, the (earlier noted) unlimited nature of Nozdrev’s realm takes on a new slant when, playing on Mt 4:8, he tells Chichikov: “Now I’m going to take you … to see the boundary line where my land [literally, “earth”] ends”107—an implicit admission that his seemingly boundless power does not reach beyond earth. Nozdrev is a lord of this world.108 Nor is there any contradiction—however surprising this might appear at first sight, given his turbulent nature—between Nozdrev’s satanic qualities and his cultivation of the Public Prosecutor, whom he addresses, dragging him around arm in arm, with the familiar “thou.” Nozdrev is the first to tell Chichikov of the Prosecutor’s demise, and invites him personally to the funeral.109 The role

101 The etymology of Khvostyrev needs no comment; Kuvshinnikov most readily suggests the vulgar kuvshinnoe rylo (jug-face, ugly mug) (VI, 67; see Josip Matešič, ed., Russisch-deutsches phraseologisches Wörterbuch [Leipzig et al.: Langenscheidt, 1995], 675). 102 See VI, 73, 731. 103 See VI, 66, 67, 71, 171. Goethe’s Mephistopheles defends laughter as the domain of the devil as opposed to the Christian God (Faust I, V, 278). 104 The narrator describes Nozdrev as a man who acts “without any earthly reason” or “without necessity” (“без всякой причины,” “без всякой нужды”; VI, 71). Hannah Arendt has observed that almost all Christianity’s major thinkers view purely contingent actions in a negative light: “Scotus is the only thinker for whom the word ‘contingency’ has no derogatory association” (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing [New York: Harcourt, 1978], 134). 105 See Nozdrev’s statement: “духом домчимся” (VI, 68) and the narrator’s comment: “он уж в одно мгновенье ока был там” (VI, 70). Rapid change of place has, since Augustine, been seen as a characteristic of the devil (see Mahal, Mephistos Metamorphosen, 54). 106 “он везде между нами и, может быть, только ходит в другом кафтане” (VI, 72). 107 “Теперь я поведу тебя посмотреть … границу, где оканчивается моя земля” (VI, 74; ­emphasis U.H.). 108 Nozdrev’s immodest claims can be understood theologically as a covert reference to his mendacity. Addressing God, Augustine writes in the Confessions: “He who claims for himself what You have granted for common enjoyment, and seeks for himself alone what belongs to all, passes … from truth to lie” (Confessions 12:25, see Augustinus, Bekenntnisse, 357; ­emphasis U.H.). 109 Gogol stresses this detail in connection with both Nozdrev’s first and his last public appearance. Thus in Chapter One we read: “С полицеймейстером и прокурором Ноздрев тоже

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of prosecutor, however, is from time immemorial connected with Satan: “Do you come always only to accuse?” the Lord inquires of Mephistopheles at the beginning of Goethe’s Faust.110 Nozdrev’s final betrayal of Chichikov at the ball is, then, fully in line with his diabolical dimension.111 Not that he is a particularly awe-inspiring example of the genre—in an earlier manuscript Gogol insists that Nozdrev has none of the features his contemporaries would ascribe to a demon.112 But Mephistopheles, too, that “misbegotten freak of filth and fire,”113 is less than terrifying. And the pair share more than those two attributes,114 for Nozdrev—explicitly associated by Gogol with fire and mud—possesses the “full rosy cheeks”115 that Mephistopheles, a connoisseur of “full fresh cheeks,” would doubtless have relished. In turn, the devilmay-care Russian could effortlessly provide for all Faust’s wants in line with the learned doctor’s entreaty: Do you have food that does not satisfy? Or have you red gold that ever

110

111

112

113 114

115

был на ты и обращался по‑дружески” (VI, 17); in Chapter Eight: “он явился веселый, радостный, ухвативши под руку прокурора, которого, вероятно, уже таскал несколько времени” (VI, 171); in Chapter Ten: “А прокурор с испугу умер, завтра будет погребение. Ты не будешь?” (VI, 214). Faust I, V, 294. On the role of Satan in the Old Testament, see Gustav Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels. Eine kulturhistorische Satanologie von den Anfängen bis ins 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein, 1991), vol. 1, 186–199; Herbert Haag et al., Teufelsglaube, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Katzmann, 1980), 197–205; Elaine Pagels, Satans Ursprung, trans. J. Hagestedt (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1996), 67–101. Significantly, the appearance of Nozdrev as Chichikov’s accuser at the Governor’s ball (VI, 172–173) causes a reaction in the assembled company that strikingly resembles the “dumb scene” at the end of The Government Inspector—a scene Gogol intended as an anticipation of the Last Judgment (see IV, 130). “И это вовсе не произходило от того, чтобы он был какой‑нибудь демон и смотрел на всё черными глазами” (VI, 729). It is significant in this context that the final editorial process of Lermontov’s “The Demon” coincided with preparations for the publication of Dead Souls; moreover, Gogol’s revision of “The Portrait” had only been completed the previous year (see Mikhail Iu. Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Khudozhestennaia literatura, 1957–1958], vol. 2, 504). Faust I, V, 3536. Trans. here and below C. E. Passage. Significantly, Russian reception of Goethe peaked in 1830s–1840s—just as Gogol was finishing Part One of Dead Souls. See André von Gronicka, The Russian Image of Goethe. Goethe in the Russian Literature of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Hans Rothe, “Goethes Spuren im Beginn des russischen Realismus (1845–1860),” in Goethe und die Welt der Slawen, ed. Hans-Bernd Harder and Hans Rothe (Giessen: Schmitz, 1981), 158–173; Valentin Boss, Milton and the Rise of Russian Satanism (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 97. Faust I, V, 320. On Nozdrev, see above, pp. 68 and 141.

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Runs through the hand like quicksilver? A game that none may win who play …116 Nozdrev—the gambler through whose fingers money runs like water—invites his guest to a travesty of a meal and then compels him to that game of checkers whose outcome has been commented in detail in Part One of this study.117 And his very intemperance, the rejection of any but an immediate end, reflects the programmatic statement made by Faust’s tempter-spirit: “No goal or measure’s set for you.”118 Moreover, Nozdrev’s unconcealed disdain for his fellows,119 his addiction to betting,120 and, above all, his predilection for categorical denial,121 are profoundly Mephistophelian characteristics. In the face of such parallels it is less than surprising that he alone of the landowners holds so tenaciously to his dead souls that Chichikov in the end leaves with nothing. Nozdrev is a caricature of Mephistopheles’s “I am the spirit … that denies.”122 For what else than a reflex enactment of that motto is the notorious “You lie,” with which he interrupts his interlocutor as soon as the latter opens his mouth? “What could I possibly tell him?” Chichikov thought to himself, and, after a moment’s reflection, declared that he needed the

116 Faust I, V, 1678–1681. 117 I am indebted to one of my anonymous peer reviewers for the hint that in Nozdrev’s “fondness for gambling … —a game of chance—one could also note the medieval motif of playing a game of chess with the devil for one’s soul.” 118 Faust I, V, 1760. 119 As evident, for example, in the already cited dialogue: “Ну, что человечек, брось его” (VI, 66; see p. 61 in this book). Peter Michelsen’s opinion—in an otherwise very sensitive reading—that Mephistopheles has some “empathy for the human” (“Mephistos ‘eigentliches Element.’ Vom Bösen in Goethes Faust,” in Das Böse. Eine historische Phänomenologie des Unerklärlichen, ed. Carsten Colpe and Wilhelm Schmidt Biggemann [Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1993], 229–255, here 249) overlooks a possible alternative reading of the text in question: “Die Menschen dauern mich in ihren Jammertagen,/ Ich mag sogar die armen selbst nicht plagen” (‘So deep their misery, I pity all that’s human,/ I would not plague them with yet more affliction’; V, 297–8). Taken in connection with Mephistopheles’s words only seventeen lines earlier: “Ich sehe nur, wie sich die Menschen plagen” (“I see how mankind works its own affliction”; V, 280; emphases U.H.), the text suggests that there is no need for help from the devil when humans torment themselves so effectively on their own. The repetition of plagen in such close proximity suggests that Goethe wanted to sharpen Mephistopheles’s irony rather than that he was lost for an alternative rhyme-word. 120 Mephistopheles wagers not only with God but also with Faust (Faust I, V, 312, 1698). 121 Pushkin, calling on Goethe, also stressed the importance of this demonic aspect (see “O stikhotvorenii ‘Demon,’” in Aleksandr S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1974–1978], vol. 6, 233). 122 Nozdrev’s immoderate boasting does not contradict this: Mephistopheles is also a braggart.

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dead serf-souls to acquire a position in society; that he did not own any large estates, and so, until such time as he did, he ought at least to be able to lay claim to some wretched souls, of any sort.   “You lie, you lie!” said Nozdrev, without letting him finish. “You lie, brother!”   Even Chichikov himself perceivd that his invention was none too adroit and that his pretext was rather feeble.   “Very well, then, I’ll be more straightforward with you,” he said, having recovered himself. … “I’ve gotten it into my head to marry; but you must know that my bride’s father and mother are most ambitious folk. … They want their daughter’s bridegroom to have no less than three hundred serfs, without fail, and since I have practically all of a hundred and fifty peasants lacking—”   “There, you’re lying, you’re lying! Nozdrev again began shouting.123 If one recalls how tirelessly Chichikov pursues his social advancement, how ardently he dreams of offspring, how boldly he places his hopes in the Governor’s daughter, the shallow inventions of his dialogue with Nozdrev appear in a different light. The true being of the liar shines through his lies;124 “in lying,” he shows himself for what he is.125 Just as Korobochka saw into the compartments of his private chest, so does Nozdrev plumb the depths of his soul—but without any

123 “‘Что бы такое сказать ему?’—подумал Чичиков и после минутного размышления объявил, что мертвые души нужны ему для приобретения весу в обществе, что он поместьев больших не имеет, так до того времени хоть бы какие‑нибудь душонки. ‘Врешь, врешь!’—сказал Ноздрев, не давши окончить ему.—‘Врешь, брат!’ Чичиков и сам заметил, что придумал не очень ловко и предлог довольно слаб. ‘Ну, так я ж тебе скажу, прямее’,—сказал он, поправившись: ‘… Я задумал жениться; но нужно тебе знать, что отец и мать невесты преамбиционные люди …; хотят непременно, чтобы у жениха было никак не меньше трех сот душ, а так как у меня целых почти полутораста крестьян недостает …’—‘Ну врешь! врешь!’—закричал опять Ноздрев” (VI, 78–79).— That Nozdrev’s replies are an automatic reflex is evident from his initial appearance in Chapter Four, where the dialogue serves not for communication but merely as an exchange of blows. Thus he does not expect any answer to his questions: “‘Куда ездил?’—говорил Ноздрев и, не дождав­шись ответа, продолжал далее: ‘А я, брат, с ярмарки’” (VI, 64). 124 In the chronicle of his visits, Chichikov meets the Governor’s daughter only after his encounter with Nozdrev; but in the prehistory his dreamt-of wife and children are mentioned immediately before the episode corresponding with Nozdrev: “поглядывая в зеркало, подумывал он о многом приятном: о бабенке, о детской” (VI, 234). 125 See above, p. 105. Alexander Obolensky rightly observes: “Paradoxically enough, it is Nozdrev, the inveterate liar, who exposes the true nature of Chichikov’s actions” (Alexander P. Obolensky, Food Notes on Gogol [Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1972], 146).

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purpose. A spirit that only ever denies possesses no standard of either truth or lying: he has lost touch with reality. Nozdrev takes Mephistopheles’s attitude to its logical conclusion—absurdity. In contrast with both Manilov and Korobochka, his words seek neither to embellish nor to ban reality; they lack all reference to it. He serves his guest, for example, the same drink under two different names, or with consummate nonchalance summons Chichikov’s manservant Petrushka as “Vakhramei.”126 When, in Nozdrev’s realm, word and thing chance to coincide, the fact calls for special mention, as when, vaunting his losses at the fair, he proclaims: “Why, not only have I no watch on me, but not even as much as a chain—” and the narrator sees fit to comment: “Chichikov glanced at him and saw that the other certainly had no watch nor chain on.”127

c)  The Third Face of the Lie—Nihilism The relation to truth expressed in such incidental signs can only be termed a non-relation; or, as the narrator puts it, Nozdrev’s assertions “bore no resemblance either to truth or to anything else on earth”128—which locates him in a dimension of lying attained by none of his landowning peers either before or after. Not content to replace the adaequatio rei et intellectus with an inadaequatio of whatever sort, he undermines both concepts; for the act of aequare, of comparison, demands at least a strand of similarity—of whatever sort—between its terms. What, then, remains of truth in such a perspective? For the gambler Nozdrev, no more than a bet, a game: “I’ll stake my head on it, you’re lying!” he tells Chichikov; and with his brother-in-law Mizhuev he bets that he had paid ten thousand rubles for a bay stallion worth hardly a thousand; or that he had

126 “Потом пили какой‑то бальзам, носивший такое имя, какое даже трудно было припом­ нить, да и сам хозяин в другой раз назвал его уже другим именем” (VI, 76); “‘Эй! как, бишь, зовут твоего человека? Эй, Вахрамей, послушай!’—‘Да не Вахрамей, а Петрушка’.—‘Как же? да у тебя ведь прежде был Вахрамей’.—‘Никакого не было у меня Вахрамея’” (VI, 213). Valentino sees a similar mechanism at work in Nozdrev’s business dealings: “All of the exchange activity at Nozdrev’s is, of course, absolutely arbitrary” (Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism,” 551). 127 “‘Ведь на мне нет ни цепочки, ни часов …’ Чичиков взглянул и увидел точно, что на нем не было ни цепочки, ни часов” (VI, 64). See VI, 73, 74. 128 “Ноздрев понес такую околесину, которая не только не имела никакого подобия правды, но даже, просто, ни на что не имела подобия” (VI, 209; see also 174: Nozdrev‘s behavior is also “ни на что не похоже”). Gogol’s idiom here (ponesti okolesinu) features the wheel motif central to Dead Souls.

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quaffed not just ten but seventeen bottles of champagne.129 The point of such bravado is clearly not to verify a fact of any sort but merely to trump one’s opponent. And he does not even need an opponent to work himself into a frenzy of competitive invention: To the question: Was it not a fact that the said Chichikov had intended to carry off the Governor’s daughter, and was it not a fact that he, Nozdrev, had himself volunteered to help and participate in this affair? Nozdrev answered: Yes, he did help, and that had it not been for him, Nozdrev, nothing at all would have happened. At this point he did bring himself up short, perceiving that he had lied absolutely without any need … but by then it was utterly beyond his power to curb his tongue. … He even gave the name of the village where the parish church was wherein the eloping couple proposed to get married, the village of Trukhmachevka. … The details had reached such a point that he was already beginning to reel off the first names of all the coachmen involved.130 With the prominence he gives to the vocabulary of naming, Gogol underlines the total lack of a correlative to the words on Nozdrev’s lips. That is in itself reminiscent of Manilov, with the difference that where the latter is so drugged by the sound of words as to lose sight of their referent, Nozdrev cares for neither word nor referent. On the one occasion when they concur—a possibility whose contemplation had thrust Korobochka into atavistic terror—he is oblivious to it. For him, every new word is a joker that outbids the last, whether one’s own or another’s. The principle we observed in Manilov and Korobochka, namely the primacy of word over thing—in Manilov’s case measured in value, with Korobochka in magical power—rises in Nozdrev to the primacy of primacy itself, at which point it becomes meaningless, for here nothing has meaning, nothing is important any more. Outwardly bursting with irrepressible life, Nozdrev reveals

129 “Голову ставлю, что врешь!” (VI, 79). For Nozdrev’s two bets with his brother-in-law see VI, 66, 73. 130 “На вопрос, точно ли Чичиков имел намерение увезти губернаторскую дочку и правда ли, что он сам взялся помогать и участвовать в этом деле, Ноздрев отвечал, что помогал и что если бы не он, то не вышло бы ничего. Тут он и спохватился было, видя, что солгал вовсе напрасно …, но языка никак уже не мог придержать. … [Д]аже названа была по имени деревня, где находилась та приходская церковь, в которой положено было венчаться, именно деревня Трухмачевка. … Подробности дошли до того, что уже начинал называть по именам ямщиков” (VI, 208–209; emphasis U.H.).

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himself on closer inspection as a radical nihilist131—a two-facedness that again recalls Mephistopheles.

d)  Nozdrev and Chichikov In Nozdrev—that much is clear—Chichikov encounters the “deceiving spirit”132 in the fullness of flesh. But if the hypothesis holds that in this fullness, as on the other four estates, what he meets is a facet of his former self, the question arises as to which hidden aspect of Chichikov’s former dealings with truth is embodied in the demon Nozdrev. The narrator provides a hint in Chapter Eleven when, at the end of the customs-post episode (which, incidentally, is rich in diabolical references),133 Chichikov not only laments fortune’s fickleness in allowing the authorities to break up his smuggling syndicate, but rises to the grandiloquent delusion of naming his fate “suffering for the truth while serving his country.”134 In itself there is nothing new in this: Chichikov had used the same technique at the building commission. What is new is the way in which, at a single blow, he deprives himself of the fruits of his simulation. In true Nozdrevian manner he uses a phrase against his smuggler accomplice that happens to be true; but, in the verbal duel that ensues, the difference between truth and untruth is irrelevant: all that counts is the value of the word as trump: Somehow, during a heated conversation, and perhaps even in his cups, Chichikov called the other official a priest’s son, while the other, who actually was a priest’s son, became for some reason sorely offended and answered Chichikov right then and there, forcefully and with unusual sharpness, in precisely the following terms: “No, you lie—I’m a State Councilor, and no priest’s son; but as for you, why you are a priest’s son for sure!” And

131 In a posthumously published note Nietzsche writes: “That there is no truth … —is itself a nihilism, and indeed the most extreme [nihilism] of all” (Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, 351). Epistemological nihilism of this kind has little to do with the nihilism of a Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, or Pisarev, all of whom considered themselves in possession of firmly grounded scientific truth and are in that sense better termed “realists” (see Wilhelm Goerdt, Russische Philosophie. Zugänge und Durchblicke [Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1984], 422). Gogol would likely have come across “nihilism” at its Russian source: his contemporary, ­Nadezhdin. 132 Faust I, V, 1854. 133 Here the roots bes and chort occur twice, nelegkii zver′ once (VI, 235–236). 134 “Это называл он: потерпеть по службе за правду” (VI, 238).

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i­ mmediately thereafter he added, just to pique and vex the o­ ther more: “So there, that’s just what you are, now!” Although he thus won a crushing, all-round victory, having turned on him the very name Chichikov had bestowed upon him, and although the expression “So there, that’s just what you are now!” might have been considered a strong one, yet not content with this he also lodged secret information against Chichikov. 135 The parallels with the end of the game of checkers between Chichikov and Nozdrev are unmistakable; in each case it was above all a matter of repaying the other with “the very name … bestowed upon him”: “No, brother, I kept track of all the moves, and I remember everything; you put it there just now. There’s the right square for it!”   “What do you mean? What square?” asked Nozdrev, turning red. “Why, brother, you’re making things up, as I see it!”   “No, brother, it looks as if you were the one who’s making things up—but not any too successfully.” …   “No, you can’t get out of it,” said Nozdrev, getting steamed up, “the game has been started.”   “I have the right to get out of it, because you’re not playing in a way that befits an honest man.”   “No, you’re lying, you can’t say such things!”   “No, brother, you’re lying yourself!”136

135 “Как‑то в жарком разговоре, а может быть, несколько и выпивши, Чичиков назвал другого чиновника поповичем, а тот, хотя действительно был попович, неизвестно почему обиделся жестоко и ответил ему тут же сильно и необыкновенно резко, именно вот как: ‘Нет, врешь, я статский советник, а не попович, а вот ты так попович!’ И потом еще прибавил ему в пику для большей досады: ‘Да вот, мол, что!’ Хотя он отбрил таким образом его кругом, обратив на него им же приданное название, и хотя выражение ‘вот, мол, что!’ могло быть сильно, но, недоволный сим, он послал еще на него тайный донос” (VI, 237). The (semi-)drunken state of the two quarrelers here is also reminiscent of Nozdrev. 136 “‘Нет, брат, я все ходы считал и всё помню; ты ее только теперь пристроил; ей место вон где!’—‘Как, где место?’—сказал Ноздрев, покрасневши.—‘Да ты, брат, как я вижу, сочинитель!’—‘Нет, брат, это, кажется, ты сочинитель, да только неудачно’. … —‘Нет, ты не можешь отказаться’,—говорил Ноздрев, горячась: ‘игра начата!’—‘Я имею право отказаться, потому что ты не так играешь, как прилично честному человеку’.—‘Нет, врешь, ты этого не можешь сказать!’—‘Нет, брат, сам ты врешь!’” (VI, 85).

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In both cases Chichikov, for all his agility, trips up on the pronouncement of a simple truth, and to that extent his plaint at “suffering for the truth”—probably the most shameless lie of his entire career—is wholly justified. With Pythian finesse, fate engineers his downfall by means of the same blurred boundary between truth and lying that Chichikov has so brazenly fostered.137

4. Sobakevich Chichikov finds himself thrust by Nozdrev into the position of militant adversary of cheats and liars, a remarkable metamorphosis for that artist of pretense and one that foreshadows the next staging post on his journey, where ­Sobakevich—the most artful swindler of all—will present himself as the lone advocate of truth in a world of lies. The paradox of this role as the central link between Sobakevich and Chichikov’s prehistory has already been commented upon (Part One, pp. 36–37). The present section will confine itself, then, to recapitulating their relation and adding some complementary observations.

a)  Sobakevich and Chichikov If the first setback in his career was the work of a superior officer whose ostentatious love of truth, although soon infected by an all-pervading corruption, proved immune to all Chichikov’s adaptive wiles,138 then, in Sobakevich, Gogol’s liar-hero encounters a precisely parallel situation. Here, in the person of a confessed enemy of public lying, whose grasp he seeks to escape with the most effective weapon in his repertoire, instant learning, but against whom he finds even this means ineffective—here all is déjà‑vu. In his dealings with the “Bear”

137 Two further examples from the truth-lies context show the subtle workings of Nemesis in Dead Souls: (1) Nozdrev’s complaining brother-in-law Mizhuev is depicted in Chapter Four as a character who first refuses to call stupidity clever and then does just that (VI, 69). Arriving at the Governor’s ball, Nozdrev makes Chichikov into a Mizhuev— see the narrator’s comment: “Как ни глупы слова дурака, и иногда бывают они достаточны, чтобы смутить умного человека” (VI, 173; emphasis U.H.). (2) A Russian idiom is used to compare Nozdrev’s bragging with the casting of bullets: “уж начал пули лить” (VI, 71), “слил им пулю порядочную” (VI, 214); but just before Nozdrev’s arrest the narrator enlarges on the image of a bullet that stops a daredevil lieutenant’s throat: “уже свищет роковая пуля, готовясь захлопнуть его крикливую глотку” (VI, 87; emphasis U.H.). 138 See above, pp. 54–55.

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Sobakevich, Chichikov tries out, one after the other, every gambit he has used with the previous three landowners, and one after the other they fail. His first attempt—warned by the damning echo aroused in his host by his praise for the city elders—is a carefully worded Manilovian euphemism: “Concerning the main theme Chichikov expressed himself with the utmost caution: he by no means called the souls dead, but merely not actually in existence.”139 ­Manilov had approached the subject of death with similar delicacy, speaking not of ‘dead souls’ but of such “that, in a kind of way, have done with their existence.”140 Here—just as in his session with the earlier landowner Chichikov had broken the social convention of the “constant quieting of death” (Heidegger)141 by calling the pudendum by its name—so Sobakevich now inquires “very simply, without the least surprise, as if it were grain they were talking about”: “‘You need dead souls?’”142 Gogol underlines the exchange of roles when he has Chichikov insist in his reply on the circumlocution: “Yes. … Those that are not actually in existence.”143 It is as if Manilov were speaking through him. His next approach to the Bear under the veil of sensibility is similarly frustrated by Sobakevich’s directness. To Chichikov’s tactful suggestion that the other would “doubtless … be pleased”—and he uses the Manilovian priiatno—to get the dead souls off his hands, Sobakevich responds soberly “I’m ready to sell them, if you like.”144 So, as Manilovian techniques are evidently pointless with this adversary, Chichikov moves on to what he had learnt from Korobochka, namely that souls are “such a strange commodity [tovar takoi strannyi]” (VI, 54) that it’s hard to put a price on them. His response at the time had been that he “hoped the Devil would take her,”145 but he is not beneath using the lesson (including the curse) in the face of Sobakevich’s excessive desire for profit: “‘The Devil take it!’ Chichikov thought to himself. ‘This fellow is already selling them before I’ve let a peep out of me!’ and said, aloud: ‘And what would the price be,

139 “Насчет главного предмета Чичиков выразился очень осторожно: никак не назвал душ умершими, а только несуществующими” (VI, 101). See VI, 96–97. 140 VI, 36; for Russian text see note 11 on p. 122. 141 Being and Time, §51. 142 “‘Вам нужно мертвых душ?’—спросил Собакевич очень просто, без малейшего удивления, как бы речь шла о хлебе” (VI, 101). There is, perhaps, an implicit theological reference here to the biblical image of the grain of wheat (see, for example, Jn 12:24). 143 “‘Да’,—отвечал Чичиков, и опять смягчил выражение, прибавивши: ‘несуществующих’” (VI, 101). 144 “‘А если найдутся, то вам, без сомнения … будет приятно от них избавиться?’— ‘Извольте, я готов продать’,—сказал Собакевич” (VI, 101). On the significance of the word priiatnyi for the code of Sentimentalism see above, p. 122. 145 “посулил ей чорта” (VI, 54).

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for instance? Although, by the bye, this is such a thing … that it’s even odd to talk of the price—.’”146 Sobakevich’s cold-blooded reply, “a hundred rubles a head,”147 tells the procurer of souls unmistakably that feigning Korobochka-like naïveté will not work either. Brought up short, Chichikov resorts to an explanation modeled on Nozdrev, one of whose specialties was to exchange words at random. Might this also be the case with Sobakevich? “‘A hundred rubles a head!’ Chichikov cried out … without knowing if he had heard aright himself or whether Sobakevich’s tongue … had not worked right, blurting one word out instead of another.”148 But he is mistaken: no one sets more store by the relation between verbal sign and real substrate than Sobakevich. And his error has a price: Chichikov strikes a deal with him, but Sobakevich dictates the conditions and sells his ledger-entry souls dearer than any of his predecessors, for two-and-a-half rubles a head (VI, 105).149 Above all, however, Chichikov’s triple miscalculation documents the failure of his strategy of adaptation. This, too, has close parallels in his prehistory. Like Nozdrev, Sobakevich pounces on any lie; but—in contrast with that hothead’s reflex accusations—Sobakevich’s suspicions are intended precisely to bring the facts of the matter to light: “Chichikov began making excuses that he did not have that much [money] with him, but Sobakevich told him so affirmatively that he did have the money that Chichikov took out another note.”150 Not that Sobakevich is interested in facts as such; to him they are mere instruments of power; on the ethical scale, this provincial Machiavelli sees truth and lies as equal.151 He warns Chichikov of the illegality of his dealings, and of the possible implications for his creditworthiness of their becoming public— that is, of the truth being known—purely in order to improve his own bargaining position.152 However, his blackmail has the irrevocable effect of forcing the 146 “‘Чорт возьми’,—подумал Чичиков про себя: ‘этот уж продает еще прежде, чем я заикнулся!’—и проговорил вслух: ‘А , например, как же цена, хотя, впрочем, конечно, это такой предмет … что о цене даже странно …’” (VI, 101; emphasis U.H.). 147 “‘Да чтобы не запрашивать с вас лишнего, по сту рублей за штуку!’—сказал Собакевич” (VI, 101). 148 “‘По сту!’—вскричал Чичиков, … не зная, сам ли он ослышался или язык Собакевича … брякнул, вместо одного, другое слово” (VI, 101). 149 VI, 105. For a lucid analysis of Sobakevich’s qualities as a businessman, see Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism,” 554. 150 “Чичиков стал было отговариваться, что нет [денег]; но Собакевич так сказал утвердительно, что у него есть деньги, что он вынул еще бумажку” (VI, 107). Sobakevich even holds Chichikov’s banknotes up to the light as if anticipating the later rumor that the purchaser of souls is a big-time forger (VI, 107). 151 See, for example, chapter 18 of Machiavelli’s Principe. 152 See above, p. 56.

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swindler to continue with his swindling. Chichikov’s trade in souls flourishes again, but he is no longer master of that trade.

b)  The Fourth Face of the Lie—Cynicism Sobakevich’s attitude to truth is characterized by a manipulative skepticism that precisely fulfills the definition of cynicism. In his very name this “Sonofabitch” bears that quality as epithet. Moreover, he shows his affinity with the ancient Cynics in his bitter critique of public office-holders, which seeks a solution neither in revolution nor in anchoritic withdrawal, but, on the contrary, “needs the existing order of society as a butt for criticism.”153 In the modern sense of the word Sobakevich is even more of a cynic—one who exploits for particular purposes a value to which he appeals as absolute, as transcending all such purposes. Pavel Kouba has observed that “[t]he cynic insists on acknowledged lofty ideals, calls on ultimate values to legitimize his actions, but does not believe in them. In this way he can engage in total manipulation, and do so with impunity, because he does not identify with those values. His position is impregnable.”154 In Sobakevich’s case the ideal in question is the adaequatio rei et intellectus. No one insists more than he that a thought must have an object; and Gogol stylistically underlines the polarity in this respect between him and Manilov. Not ­content to assert that the hare served at the Governor’s table is actually a skinned cat, Sobakevich maintains that this is a specialty of French cuisine. ­Manilov’s Francophile leanings, the message runs, are equally fake.155 Indeed, the very fact that Sobakevich should concern himself with what the cook puts in his pot flouts the Manilovean precept of priatnost′ (seemliness): “I know what they buy in the market. That rascal of a chef, who learned his trade from a Frenchman, will buy a cat, skin it, and

153 Heinrich Dörrie, in Der Kleine Pauly, vol. 3, col. 399f. (for English version see note 16). 154 Pavel Kouba, Nietzsche. Filosofická interpretace (Prague: Český spisovatel, 1995), 152. 155 Sobakevich’s belittling of the Enlightenment reflects an already hackneyed cliché of the eighteenth century: the young Nikolai Nikolev’s Satira na razvrashchennye nravy nyneshniago veka culminates, for example, in the exclamation “Вот просвещения Французскаго плоды!” (cited in Hildegard Schroeder, Russische Verssatire im 18. Jahrhundert [Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 1962], 174). The episode in Dead Souls does not necessarily suggest a global condemnation of the French Enlightenment; all the less so as the narrator proceeds to make a laughing stock of Sobakevich. One must take account of the complementary portrayal of both landowners, Manilov and Sobakevich, in order to gauge Gogol’s own position in this matter.

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then serve it up to you at table and say it’s rabbit [orig. zaiats, ‘hare’].”   “Faugh, what a nasty thing [nepriiatnost′] to say!” said Sobakevich’s spouse.156 A declared enemy of the lie-as-euphemism, Sobakevich insists that in his house word and thing fully coincide—indeed more than coincide: the word is regularly outdone by its correlative: “I don’t do things that way. If it’s pork I want, I order the whole swine to be served at table; if it’s mutton, drag in the whole ram; if a goose, the whole goose!”157 When he accuses everyone else of rhetorical swindling and sets himself up as the only one who gives more than he promises, who is more substance than word, Sobakevich is not, however, genuinely concerned with truth any more than was Manilov. One can measure this against the central benchmark of the novel: his attitude to the human soul. Here the two landowners score equally badly. When, against Chichikov’s remark that the dead souls “are but a dream,” the “God-damned kulak”158 protests “Well, no, they’re no dream,” he might seem at first sight to stand in opposition to the “dreamer” Manilov;159 but the eloquence with which he then seeks to persuade his guest of the vital energy of the souls he is offering bears all the marks of a rhetoric cut loose from ­reality—in other words, a Manilovean rhetoric.160 “Well, no, they’re no dream”—­Sobakevich’s words fulfill formally the conditions of his noblest maxim: always, in the name of truth, to defend the real against the apparent. But he employs that principle to deliberately furnish his nonexistent commodities with the appearance of reality. That is cynicism.161

156 “‘Ведь я знаю, что они на рынке покупают. Купит вон тот каналья повар, что выучился у француза, кота, обдерет его, да и подает на стол вместо зайца’.—‘Фу! какую ты неприятность говоришь!’—сказала супруга Собакевича” (VI, 98; emphasis U.H.). See Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 228. 157 “‘У меня не так. У меня когда свинина, всю свинью давай на стол; баранина—всего барана тащи, гусь—всего гуся!’” (VI, 99; emphasis U.H.). 158 “чортов кулак” (VI, 108). 159 Chichikov’s dialogue with Sobakevich runs: “‘это ведь мечта’.—‘Ну нет, не мечта!’” (VI, 103). In VI, 39 Manilov is explicitly associated with “daydreams” (mechtaniia). 160 The narrator pointedly calls Sobakevich’s rhetoric “a gift of gab” and observes “[he] had got into the vein”: “Собакевич вошел, как говорится, в самую силу речи, откуда взялась рысь и дар слова”; “Собакевича, как видно, пронесло; полились такие потоки речей, что только нужно было слушать” (VI, 102). 161 Sobakevich, we have seen, also tries to pass off the name of a dead woman serf as that of a man (see p. 56); moreover, everything around him seems to take on his own name (see p. 37).

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Sobakevich’s panegyric for the dead serfs is complemented by his boundless scorn for the living.162 His remorseless testing of language for its “solidity” in realis163 inevitably submits human beings to a standard of objectivity that destines them, as not exclusively material, to the less-than-material. To illustrate this, Gogol introduces to the domain of the Bear a figure about whom all we learn is that “[t]here are faces which exist upon earth not as primary objects but as foreign specks or spots upon objects.”164 That is as good as nothing. The human being, infused with an immortal soul, is reduced to the status of a mere accident—a complete reversal of the Christian hierarchy of values. This is presented to us as the logical conclusion of Sobakevich’s perspective. Setting his whole weight on the side of things, he misses the essential balance as much as does Manilov, who puts his trust wholly in words. Just as the over-valuation of words in Manilovka had led the way to their magical dominance in Korobochka’s Zamanilovka, so now the converse occurs: the dominance of things in Sobakevich’s realm announces from a distance the junk shop of Pliushkin’s estate. Not for nothing does the Sonofabitch, in calling the old man a “dog,” acknowledge him as his metaphorical father.165

c)  From Nozdrev to Sobakevich Manilov’s house stands on a windy eminence, puddles of rainwater gather before Korobochka’s premises, and in Nozdrev’s fields the water “spurt[s] forth” at every step, “so low-lying was this bog.”166 Chichikov’s journey, we gather, begins on a downward slope. Aleksandr Herzen noted this before Andrei Bely expounded it as the overall trajectory of the novel—and his concept was widely

162 “‘Да, конечно, мертвые’,—сказал Собакевич, как бы одумавшись и припомнив, что они в самом деле были уже мертвые, а потом прибавил: ‘впрочем, и то сказать: что из этих людей, которые числятся теперь живущими? Что это за люди? мухи, а не люди’” (VI, 103). 163 See the already cited: “Помещик, казалось, хлопотал много о прочности” (VI, 94). 164 “Есть лица, которые существуют на свете не как предмет, а как посторонние кра­пинки или пятнышки на предмете” (VI, 98; emphasis U.H.). 165 “‘Я вам даже не советую и дороги знать к этой собаке!’—сказал Собакевич” (VI, 99). As Simon Karlinsky notes, the canine motif connects Sobakevich with Pliushkin, too: “One might also venture to suggest that there is a strange reversal of names between Sobakevich (‘dog’s son’) and Nozdrev (‘of nostrils’). It is Nozdrev who is constantly surrounded by dogs, while his name suggests the ring through the nostrils by which the trained Russian bears, to whom Sobakevich is compared, are led about” (Karlinsky, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton,” 178). 166 For Russian text see above, note 87 on p. 139.

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accepted. For the first three stages the idea holds,167 but Bely passes over Sobakevich’s estate in silence. At first sight this seems justified, for the novel says nothing about the absolute height of the Bear’s domain; however, he does indicate its relative position, inasmuch as the narrator has Nozdrev’s village vanish out of Chichikov’s view “screened by fields, hillsides, and hillocks.”168 Given the emphasis put on its low position, the reference to hills can only indicate that from Nozdrev’s to Sobakevich’s estate the road leads upwards. For the symbolic dimension of Chichikov’s progress the changes in elevation are of considerable significance. In line with the novel’s cyclical structure, Nozdrev, not Pliushkin—the middle not the end of the journey—marks its deepest point. In such a movement, Chichikov must, after all, arrive on the same level as he began; and instead of sinking ever deeper into night—night overtook him at Korobochka’s and Nozdrev’s houses, but only there—he begins now to move toward the light. What we learn about the position of Sobakevich’s village confirms this impression, for the narrator informs us with unmistakable precision that it lies in a zone between darkness and light: “two forests, one of birch, the other of pine—like two wings, the one lighter in hue, the other darker—were, respectively, on its right and left.”169 A similar, even intenser chiaroscuro surrounds Chichikov’s next staging-post, as we shall see from the famous description of Pliushkin’s garden. It is eminently appropriate, then, that Chichikov should encounter his Beatrice at this point, rather than anywhere else on his quest. The Governor’s daughter, whose complexion is compared with the diaphanous whiteness of a newly laid egg,170 appears to the traveler as a light in the darkness at the precise moment 167 Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, ed. D. Chizhevskii (Munich: Fink, 1969), 99. Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 85, follows Bely’s thesis, as does Smirnova (Poema Gogolia “Mertvye dushi,” 126f.—with reference also to Herzen). Bely’s tendency to read Gogol’s novel as a sort of chute may be seen as a distant effect of the literary Décadence. On the spatial dimension of Dead Souls see Iris Blochel, “Bemerkungen zur Raumkonzeption in Gogol’s ‘Mertvye duši,’” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 39 (1997): 23–56; Iurii Lotman, Khudozhestvennoe prostranstvo v proze Gogolia, in his V shkole poeticheskogo slova. Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol′ [Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1988], 251–293 (Lotman only touches marginally on the novel). Iris Blochel examines the subjective relation of individual figures to space rather than their situation in space, and against this background notes the lack of “a comprehensive analysis of the concept of space” in Dead Souls (“Bemerkungen zur Raumkonzeption,” 24). 168 “деревня Ноздрева давно унеслась из вида, закрывшись полями, отлогостями и пригорками” (VI, 89). Farino, “Struktura poezdki Chichikova,” 620, cites this text without noticing that it contradicts Bely’s reading, which he supports. 169 “Деревня показалась ему довольно велика; два леса, березовый и сосновый, как два крыла, одно темнее, другое светлее, были у ней справа и слева” (VI, 93). 170 See VI, 90; for the Russian text see Introduction, note 75. Gudrun Langer’s view that the Governor’s daughter and Korobochka are “subterraneously allied” (Langer, “Pandoras

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when his passage through the realm of shades turns toward the upper world. The episode is a microcosm of the novel, reflecting in detail the end of Part One of Dead Souls. A recapitulation of the occurrences at the junction of Chapters Four and Five will underline the parallels with the novel’s two concluding chapters. Chapter Four ends with Chichikov’s forced flight from Nozdrev, which, however, is immediately interrupted at the beginning of Chapter Five by the collision of his carriage with the Governor’s barouche—an event for which the text holds various factors responsible: on a higher level, fate, on a lower, Chichikov’s coachman Selifan and his piebald trace-horse. Loudly reproached by the oncoming coachman, Selifan felt that he had been negligent, but since no Russian likes to admit to another that he is ever to blame, he consequently summoned all his dignity and had an immediate comeback: “And where do you think you’re goin’ at a clip like that? … The piebald sniffed inquisitively at the newly acquired friends he found on either side of him. … At this conjunction of events the piebald found the newly formed acquaintance so much to his liking that he did not want, under any circumstances, to get out of the rut in which unforeseen fates had placed him. …171 The waiting thereby imposed on the coaches’ inmates, and with it the retardation of time, brings a temporary sharpening of Chichikov’s perceptions.172 His attention is drawn to the Governor’s daughter in the other vehicle, from where Töchter,” 148) is convincing inasmuch as both figures play a key role on Chichikov’s path to eventual redemption. While the old widow, however, represents a largely negative force, merely obstructing Chichikov in his trickery, the young woman’s impact on him is decidedly elevating. 171 “Селифан почувствовал свою оплошность, но так как русской человек не любит сознаться перед другим, что он виноват, то тут же вымолвил он, приосанясь: ‘А ты что так расскакался?’ … Чубарый с любопытством обнюхивал новых своих приятелей, которые очутились по обеим сторонам его. … При этом обстоятельстве чубарому коню так понравилось новое знакомство, что он никак не хотел выходить из колеи, в которую попал непредвиденными судьбами” (VI, 90–91). This passage repeats the situation at Chichikov’s entry into Hades at the beginning of Chapter Three, when the drunken Selifan overturns his master’s carriage at Korobochka’s gate after lengthily scolding the piebald trace-horse (VI, 40–43). 172 Gogol emphasizes that human reason is no longer adequate to the task of finding a way out of the chaos. The muzhiks manage to separate the two vehicles, but all attempts to do the same with the horses fail; the animals only move apart when they are left in peace. Progress only becomes possible, in other words, when humans pause from their hectic rush and ­compulsive action.

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it moves to a more general consideration of the origin of evil—the education she will receive in society will lead even this innocent creature systematically to lying—before the cynic in him regains the upper hand and he reflects that with the right dowry “she might turn out to be a most dainty tidbit.”173 The key features of this process are all repeated at the juncture of Chapters Ten and Eleven. Toward the end of Chapter Ten, “in an utterly unexpected fashion”174—that is, as if sent by fate—Nozdrev appears in Chichikov’s room and causes him to leave the town posthaste. His flight is delayed, however, in Chapter Eleven by Selifan’s failure to have the broken wheel on the carriage repaired. Selifan tries to distract his master from this shortcoming by putting the blame on the piebald trace-horse: “Selifan was turning toward the door to go and carry out his orders, but stopped and said; ‘And another thing, sir, the piebald ought to be sold, really; he’s—he’s altogether a low-down creature, Pavel Ivanovich; what a horse he is—may God save us from such another; he’s just a hindrance.’”175 This time, too, the involuntary waiting focuses the perceptions, with the difference that Chichikov’s thoughts are drawn not to the beauty of innocence but to the everyday banalities around him: During this time Chichikov had the pleasure of experiencing those delectable moments which every traveler is familiar with, when everything has been packed away in the trunk …; when a man belongs neither to the road nor to any settled place. … Everything around him, everything that meets his eye—the wretched little shop opposite his windows, and the head of an old woman who lives in the house across the way, as she walks up to the window with its short curtains—everything is repulsive to him, yet go away from the window he will not. He stands there, now oblivious, now turning anew a sort of dulled attentiveness upon everything before him, whether it is ­moving or

173 “очень, очень лакомый кусочек” (VI, 93). 174 “никак не ожиданным образом” (VI, 213). 175 “Селифан оборотился было к дверям …, но остановился и сказал: ‘Да еще, сударь, чубарого коня, право, хоть бы продать, потому что он, Павел Иванович, совсем подлец; он такой конь, что просто не приведи бог, только помеха’” (VI, 217). The full force of this (and the previous) text relating to the piebald horse only becomes apparent in light of the animal’s role as Chichikov’s alter ego (see Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 90). The broken wheel is a familiar Baroque symbol of fate’s resistance to human plans (see fata obstant emblem, Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, col. 1809).

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not, and out of vexation he will crush some poor fly that persists in buzzing and beating against the windowpane even as he crushes it.176 The longer this moment of suspended time lasts, the sharper does Chichikov’s sense of the dreary truth behind the workings of the world become. Conversely, as soon as he begins to move again, this line of reflection fades. Held up one last time by the funeral procession for the Public Prosecutor, he is moved to a fresh insight into the vanity of the public reception of death: There, the Public Prosecutor lived on and on, and then he up and died! And now they will print in the papers that a respected citizen, a rare father, an exemplary spouse, has departed this life to the great sorrow of his subordinates and of all mankind, and what sort of stuff won’t they write! They’ll add, likely as not, that he was followed to his grave by the lamentations of widows and orphans, and yet, if one were to go into this matter rather thoroughly, why, on investigation it would turn out that all there really was to you was your bushy eyebrows.177 His meeting with actual death, however, is as fruitless in any wider sense as was the earlier epiphany of incarnate love. Chichikov’s state of suspended activity yields to renewed acceleration and with it to the repeated triumph of cynicism 176 “В продолжение этого времени он имел удовольствие испытать приятные минуты, известные всякому путешественнику, когда в чемодане всё уложено …, когда человек не принадлежит ни к дороге, ни к сиденью на месте. … Всё, что ни есть, всё, что ни видит он: и лавочка против его окон, и голова старухи, живущей в супротивном доме, подходящей к окну с коротенькими занавесками,—всё ему гадко, однако же он не отходит от окна. Стоит, то позабываясь, то обращая вновь какое‑то притупленное внимание на всё, что перед ним движется и не движется, и душит с досады какую‑нибудь муху, которая в это время жужжит и бьется об стекло под его пальцем” (VI, 218). 177 “Вот, прокурор! жил, жил, а потом и умер! И вот напечатают в газетах, что скончался, к прискорбию подчиненных и всего человечества, почтенный гражданин, редкий отец, примерный супруг, и много напишут всякой всячины; прибавят, пожалуй, что был сопровождаем плачем вдов и сирот; а ведь если разобрать хорошенько дело, так, на поверку, у тебя только и было, что густые брови” (VI, 219–220). Chichikov’s monologue also has some autobiographical aspects, such as his predilection for the phrase “widows and orphans”; or “what sort of stuff ” (= “all sorts of oddments”), which recalls the title of Gogol’s own first poetic notebook (Vsiakaia vsiachina: Book of Allsorts). The implications of the reduction of the “eye of the law” to a pair of “bushy eyebrows” have been nicely elaborated in Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia, 241.

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over insight: “Here he ordered Selifan to drive on faster and in the meantime reflected: ‘That’s a good thing, though, meeting this funeral; they say meeting a dead man is an omen of good luck.’”178 The striking narrative parallels between the junctures of Chapters Four and Five, and Ten and Eleven, leave scarcely room for doubt that Gogol intended everything Chichikov underwent on the way from Nozdrev to Sobakevich as a prefiguration of his final flight from town. This reinforces the sense, already given by the topographical markers in the text, that Chichikov’s passage through the Inferno is not a hyperbola but a parabola: far from proceeding consistently downward, it rises again at its central vertex.

d)  The Deathless Koshchei On the symbolic level, we have so far distinguished three stages in Chichikov’s journey: the gatekeeper of Hades led him to the mistress of the ancient heathen underworld, the realm of the dead, from where he proceeded to the master of the Christian hell. Where, then, in the mythological system of Dead Souls, does the fourth stage of his journey lie? Gogol has again set various signposts in the text. In the first place, the bear-like Sobakevich is the embodiment of the primevally Russian. Of himself he says that he is but a shadow of a far stronger line; in view of his powerful build, however, such assertions intensify rather than weaken his association with the age of mighty Russian warriors.179 Secondly, he is favored with his own personal creation myth: Sobakevich is the work not of the Christian God but of a personified force of nature: As everyone knows, there are many such faces in this world, over the finishing of which Nature did not spend much thought  …, but simply hacked away with a full swing of the arm: one swipe of the ax and there’s the nose for you; another swipe and there are the lips; with a great auger she gouged out the eyes, and, without wasting any time on trimming and finishing, she let her handiwork out into the world, saying: “It lives!”

178 “Тут он приказал Селифану ехать поскорее и между тем подумал про себя: ‘Это, однако ж, хорошо, что встретились похороны; говорят, значит счастие, если встретишь покойника’” (VI, 220; emphasis U.H.). 179 See VI, 144–145.

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Just such a sturdy and wondrously roughhewn countenance did ­Sobakevich have.180 This alone would suffice to ascribe him to the sphere of a specifically Russian heathenism; but the narrator goes further, comparing him with the Deathless Koshchei, whose soul was hidden for protection in an egg: It seemed as if there were no soul at all in his body; or, if it were there, it was not at all in the place it should be, but, as with Koshchei the Deathless in the fairy tale, somewhere beyond many hills and dales and sheathed in such a thick shell that everything which stirred at the bottom of his soul created absolutely no commotion on the surface. 181 The Protean nature of this figure is reflected in the fact that every object in Sobakevich’s realm, from chair to caged blackbird, bears a close resemblance to its master.182 Above all, however, the Koshchei of folk tradition often appears as the antagonist of a young man seeking his bride,183 and Gogol alludes to just this situation by granting Chichikov a distant glimpse of the Governor’s daughter on his way to Sobakevich and then immediately removing her from sight. That the young lady’s face is compared to a translucent egg underlines her antithetical connection with the armor-clad Russian anti-hero.184 The motif of the egg connects the thick-skinned Sobakevich with yet another figure in Dead Souls, the ogre-like “man of might” (bogatyr′) Mokii Kifovich,

180 “Известно, что есть много на свете таких лиц, над отделкою которых натура недолго мудрила …, но просто рубила со всего плеча, хватила топором раз—вышел нос, хватила в другой—вышли губы, большим сверлом ковырнула глаза и, не обскобливши, пустила на свет, сказавши: ‘живет!’ Такой же самый крепкий и на диво стаченный образ был у Собакевича” (VI, 94–95; emphasis U.H.). Guerney’s translation rightly allows no human element into this passage: the result of Nature’s action, “let … out into the world,” is simply her “handiwork.” 181 “Казалось, в этом теле совсем не было души, или она у него была, но вовсе не там, где следует, а, как у бессмертного кощея, где‑то за горами и закрыта такою толстою скорлупою, что всё, что ни ворочалось на дне ее, не производило решительно никако­го потрясения на поверхности” (VI, 101). 182 See VI, 95, 96. In light of the fairy tale, Sobakevch’s odd complaint about his indestructible health acquires an ominous ring: this “Deathless Koshchei” knows his vulnerability—and the logic of fairy tales rules that the supposedly immortal shall surely die (VI, 145). 183 See Aleksandr N. Afanas′ev, Narodnye russkie skazki, ed., intro., and comment. V. Ia. Propp (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1957), no. 158. 184 See Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 21.

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legitimate offspring of a father who spent his time wondering why elephants do not lay eggs: “Well, now, suppose an elephant were to be born in a shell? Why, I guess the eggshell would be mighty thick, then; there would be no breaking it through even with a cannon.”185 This pseudo-philosopher, whom we have already met (Part One, 92–95) as Manilov’s brother-in-spirit is evidently less concerned at the damage caused by his rampaging son than at that caused to his name by the town calling the young giant a dog:186 “now there’s the trouble! The whole town will find out and call him a downright dog. … Well, if he’s bound to remain a dog, then don’t let people find it out from me.”187 Taking these points together one can say that in Sobakevich’s domain Chichikov experiences a twofold epiphany, both positive and negative. Immediately after the encounter with his potential Christian bride comes the meeting with urRussian paganism, a power that will keep the young girl enchained until her final liberation. The close coupling of the two events (and powers) through the symbol of the egg indicates more clearly than anything else that Chichikov’s soul can only rise toward heaven once it has shed its autochthonous Russian shell— which, until that moment comes, will serve its precious contents as protection and prison combined. The elemental Russianness conjured in these images is characterized by a violent contempt for words and a robust bellicosity, a combination that—if we read the parable of the philosophizing father and his dog-like son aright—is the other face of a no less radical scorn for all that is hard-and-fast in favor of the word. Both Sobakevich and Manilov embody the difference between word and thing, but each from a dialectically opposite standpoint. And this difference is at the same time the basis of Chichikov’s entire mercantile project. Where word and thing coincide there is nothing the conman can achieve. Which is why, in hindsight, Manilov and Sobakevich are the only two landowners he purposely seeks out—they mark the first and last logical steps on his quest to turn pure names into hard coin.

185 “Ну, а если бы слон родился в яйце, ведь скорлупа, чай, сильно бы толста была, пушкой не прошибешь” (VI, 244). See above, pp. 92–93. 186 “вот беда! город узнает, назовет его совсем собакой. … Уж если он и останется собакой, так пусть же не от меня об этом узнают” (VI, 244). 187 It may be noted here that the Russian folk-spell against rabid dogs alludes to the fairy tale of the Deathless Koshchei: “На море на Океане, на острове на Буяне стоит дом, а в том доме сидит старица, а держит она жало … смертное” (M. Zabylin, Russkii narod. Ego obychai, obriady, predaniia, sueveriia i poeziia [Moscow: Avtor, 1992], 389; orthography modernized).

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5. Pliushkin a)  From Sobakevich to Pliushkin Pliushkin’s name does not initially stand on Chichikov’s list; it is put there as an immediate result of Sobakevich’s warning—for Chichikov, an unambiguous recommendation—that the old miser’s serfs are “dying off like flies.”188 This circumstance clearly demonstrates the intimacy of the union within the underlying logic of the novel—over and above Sobakevich’s inner-fictional intention— between these last two of Gogol’s landowners. Sobakevich leads the traveler to ­Pliushkin as Manilov led him to Korobochka. And the relation echoes in the play of names, where the pairing Manilovka/Zamanilovka is matched by Sobakevich/sobaka (dog) when Sobakevich calls his aged neighbor “that dog.” The two landowers also share intrinsic attitudes: like Sobakevich, Pliushkin holds forth against lying, yet lies unashamedly whenever he sees gain in doing so. “I’m too old, my good man, to go in for lying now,” he tells the newcomer just after he, the master of the house, has put him off with the assertion that the master is “[n]ot at home.”189 He steals from his serfs whatever he can lay his fingers on and, unless they catch him red-handed, swears by the Almighty that he has acquired whatever it was rightly and lawfully.190 At the same time, he accuses them of theft and threatens them with the “dread Day of Judgment” as punishment for their lies.191 At first sight such double standards in the matter of truth, and the accompanying mistrust Pliushkin evinces for even the slightest positive sentiment in his fellows, strikingly resemble Sobakevich’s cynicism. His principle appears to be not to trust anyone until you can attribute a base motive to their actions. When he hears Chichikov’s ostensibly selfless offer to take on the tax burden of his dead serfs, his first reaction is that his guest must be “an utter simpleton,” a judgment he qualifies with the assumption that he must have “served as an officer”—which amounts to much the same thing. Finally, he concludes, the stranger will have thought the

188 “‘Как мухи мрут.’—‘Неужели как мухи?—позвольте спросить: как далеко живет он от вас?’” (VI, 99). 189 See: “Стар я, батюшка, чтобы лгать” (VI, 122) and “‘Послушай, матушка’,—сказал он [Чичиков], выходя из брички: ‘что барин? …’—‘Нет дома’” (VI, 114). 190 “он божился, что вещь его, куплена им тогда‑то, у того‑то или досталась от деда” (VI, 117). 191 See Pliushkin’s argument with his housekeeper about the mislaid piece of paper: “Врешь, ты снесла пономаренку. … Вот погоди‑ка: на страшном суде черти припекут тебя за это железными рогатками! вот посмотришь, как припекут!” (VI, 126–127).

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whole scheme up for the sake of “getting his fill of tea.”192 Pliushkin’s reduction of every human motive to material interests is again reminiscent of Sobakevich, whose fixation on solidity finds morbid intensification in the miser’s passion for collecting objects of any and every kind. Yet, there is a basic difference between them that is best expressed in the term development. The last of Gogol’s five landowners was, as mentioned above (Part One, 49), initially conceived as a candidate for spiritual resurrection, and in this respect the overarching plan of Dead Souls is verified, the key elements intended for development into epic realities in the later parts of the novel all being contained in the first part as potentialities. Thus, despite his seemingly incorrigible mistrust of others—a trait he shares with Sobakevich—Pliushkin undergoes an astonishing metamorphosis in the course of his conversation with Chichikov, even gratefully acknowledging the latter’s show of altruism, a naïvety of which Sobakevich would never have been capable.193 Scholars have, in fact, frequently observed that Pliushkin’s insensate condition is viewed by the narrator not statically but as the result of a gradual process. In this context, the digression inserted at this point touches revealingly on the issue of truth—rendered in Guerney’s translation as “verisimilitude”: “And is it to such insignificance, such pettiness, such vileness that a man could sink? Could a man change to such an extent? And does all this have any verisimilitude? All this has verisimilitude, all this can befall a man.”194

b)  The Forgotten Face of Truth—the Divine Logos In contrast with Korobochka, Nozdrev, or Sobakevich, Pliushkin’s character is not unchangeable; it moves in successive stages from an original purity to ­extreme corruption. However, in the tension between these two poles the

192 “Плюшкин заключил, что гость должен быть совершенно глуп и только прикидывается, будто служил по статской, а, верно, был в офицерах” (VI, 123); “он подумал про себя: ‘Ведь чорт его знает; может быть, он просто хвастун, как все эти мотишки: наврет, наврет, чтобы поговорить да напиться чаю, а потом и уедет!’” (VI, 124–125). 193 The different attitude of the two men to their own mortality is also typical: while Sobakevich mistrusts his blooming health as a bad omen (“Нет, не к добру! когда‑нибудь придется поплатиться за это”; VI, 145), Pliushkin—uniquely in Dead Souls—views human transience (including his own) as willed by God (see VI, 125: “сегодня жив, а завтра и бог весть”; VI, 130: “лучше оставлю их ему после моей смерти”). 194 “И до такой ничтожности, мелочности, гадости мог снизойти человек! мог так измениться! И похоже это на правду? Всё похоже на правду, всё может статься с человеком” (VI, 127).

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p­ ossibility of the pendulum swinging back remains open. The same bipolarity marks Pliushkin’s relation to truth: in concreto he lies more often than you can count, yet in abstracto he retains a clear awareness of the sinfulness of lying. That the abuse of words will be accounted for at the Last Judgment underlies his threats to his serfs; and he is aware of the theological foundation of that principle in the divine origin of the logos, proclaimed in the Gospel of St. John and the Book of Revelation. Alluding to the latter work, he reminds his mendacious visitor of the forgotten face of truth: “No matter what anyone may say, there’s no one can withstand the Word of God!”195 Words serve to articulate the contours of reality; naming is a divine prerogative in which humanity participates. This foundational Christian understanding of the logos is expressed by the narrator in the following eulogy: The Russian people have a puissant way of expressing themselves! And if they bestow an apt word upon any man, it will follow him into his lineage and into his posterity; he will drag it along with him wherever he serves, and into his retirement, and to St. Petersburg, and to the ends of the earth. … That which is aptly uttered is tantamount to that which is written: there’s no rooting it out, though you were to use an ax. And how very apt, of a certainty, is that which has come out of the very core of ­Russia, where there is … the living and lively Russian wit, that is never at a loss for a word, that … comes spang out with it, like a passport to be carried through all eternity, and there’s no use your adding on later what sort of nose or lips you have: you are drawn, at a stroke, from head to foot!196 In this tale the logos exactly expresses what it names, in the full sense of the Platonic contemplation of the “idea,” the eternal essence that emerges with the bestowal of a name. But of equal importance for Gogol’s novel is the situation 195 “ведь что ни говори, а против слова‑то божия не устоишь” (VI, 123). See Rev 19:13: “Имя Ему: Слово Божие”. 196 “Выражается сильно российский народ! и если наградит кого словцом, то пойдет оно ему в род и потомство, утащит он его с собою и на службу, и в отставку, и в Петербург, и на край света. … Произнесённое метко, всё равно что писанное, не вырубливается топором. А уж куды бывает метко всё то, что вышло из глубины Руси, где … всё сам‑самородок, живой и бойкой русской ум, что не лезет за словом в карман, … а влепливает сразу, как пашпорт на вечную носку, и нечего прибавлять уже потом, какой у тебя нос или губы—одной чертой обрисован ты с ног до головы!” (VI, 108–109; ­emphasis U.H.).

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in which this line of thought emerges, occasioned by the nickname given to ­Pliushkin by the muzhiks, “the patched” (zaplatannoi).197 Clad in an indefinable patchwork of incongruous garments the old deceiver is his own walking nickname, embodying—involuntarily, paradoxically—the absolute congruence of word and thing. In his very being he represents two opposites: the adaequatio rei et intellectus and the deviation from this norm. In him the tension between the claim of language as guarantor of truth and the reality has become flesh.

c)  The Christian Sinner Pliushkin oscillates, then, between theoretical insight into the divine imperative of truth and the lying practice of everyday life, between the purity of origins and the corruption of age—that is his defining characteristic. In the ethical topography of Dead Souls he marks no single point: not the moral nadir and certainly no high point, but the path stretching between the two. This finds expression in the famous passage describing the old man’s garden. In contrast with the other four landowners, Pliushkin’s estate is qualified with neither absolute nor relative coordinates of height. But Gogol was manifestly at pains to delineate, at the heart of that domain, the simultaneity of opposing dimensions—high and low, above and beneath, light and dark—and the enduring possibility of movement between them: The joined summits of trees that had attained their full growth in freedom lay in green clouds and irregular cupolas of trembling foliage against the skyline. The colossal white trunk of a birch that had been deprived of its crest by some tempest or thunderstorm rose up out of this thick green tangle and, high in the air, looked like a round, regular column of dazzling marble; the oblique, sharply pointed fracture in which it terminated in lieu of a capital showed darkly against its snowy whiteness, like a cap or some black-plumed bird. The hopvines that stifled the elder, rowan, and hazel bushes below and then ran all over the tops of the paling, at last darted halfway up the broken birch and entwined it. After reaching its middle, the vine hung down from there and was already beginning to catch at the tips of other trees. … In places 197 See above, p. 43. See also Valentino’s interpretation of this episode (Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism,” 557).

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the green, sunlit thickets parted and revealed some depression in their midst, sunless and gaping like a dark maw; it would be all enveloped in shadow and one could barely, barely glimpse in its dark depths a narrow path running through it; fallen railings; a rickety arbor; … and, finally, a young maple branch, extending from one side its green paws of leaves. Getting under one of these leaves, God alone knows how, the sun would suddenly transform it into a thing of transparency and fire that shone wondrously amid this dense darkness. Off to one side, at the very edge of the garden, a few tall aspens, rising above their fellows, lifted high into the air the enormous raven nests upon their quivering summits. Some of these aspens had branches broken but not completely severed, which dangled, their leaves all withered.198 A clue can be found here as to why Pliushkin has two—albeit derelict—­ churches on his estate,199 a feature that distinguishes him from the other landowners, among whom only Manilov, with his heathen temple, has a place of worship of any kind.200 Of all his fellows—Manilov, the gatekeeper of Hades,

198 “Зелеными облаками и неправильными, трепетолистными куполами лежали на небесном горизонте соединенные вершины разросшихся на свободе дерев. Белый колоссальный ствол березы, лишенный верхушки, отломленной бурею или грозою, подымался из этой зеленой гущи и круглился на воздухе, как правильная мраморная, сверкаюущая колонна; косой, остроконечный излом его, которым он оканчивал­ся к верху вместо капители, темнел на снежной белизне его, как шапка или черная птица. Хмель, глушивший внизу кусты бузины, рябины и лесного орешника и пробежавший потом по верхушке всего частокола, взбегал наконец вверх и обвивал до половины сломленную березу. Достигнув середины ее, он оттуда свешивался вниз и начинал уже цеплять вершины других дерев. … Местами расходились зеленые чащи, озаренные солнцем, и показывали неосвещенное между них углубление, зиявшее, как темная пасть; оно было всё окинуто тенью, и чуть‑чуть мелькали в черной глубине его: бежавшая узкая дорожка, обрушенные перилы, пошатнувшаяся беседка …, и, наконец, 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. В стороне, у самого края сада, несколько высокорослых, не вровень другим, осин подымали огромные вороньи гнезда на трепетные свои вершины. У иных из них отдернутые и не вполне отделенные ветви висели вниз вместе с иссохшими листьями” (VI, 112–113). 199 See VI, 112. Already on Chichikov’s way to Pliushkin the narrator’s account features churches, monasteries, and crosses (VI, 109). 200 An earlier version of the text also has a church on Korobochka’s estate: “церковь [на селе] хоть и не [очень] богатая была, [однако же] поддержана, и правились и заутрени и обедни исправно” (VI, 691). Significantly, Gogol changed this in the final version and ­depicted Korobochka, for all her bigotry, in more univocally heathen terms.

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Korobochka, the goddess of the underworld, Nozdrev, the Mephistophelian, and Sobakevich, the Deathless Koshchei—Pliushkin is the only one who bears signs of being a genuine Christian,201 but a Christian out of whose house a cold wind blows “as from a cellar.”202 Pliushkin is a fallen Christian. His name most likely derives from the onomatopoetic verb pliukhat′(sia) or pliukhnut′(sia), which audibly renders the sound made by splashing into or wading through water. Images of falling into and sinking in water, or of being pitched into mud, occur systematically throughout Dead Souls, and the decrepit figure of ­Pliushkin—in whom we hear the echo of Chichikov’s father, with “the eternal scraping and flip-flapping of [his] scuffs through the room” (VI, 224)—marks the end of this particular descent. However, Pliushkin’s name has also on occasion been associated with the Russian word for ivy (pliushch);203 and in a certain sense he does also resemble the climbing plants in his garden—for all beings whose striving never ceases, the passage from darkness to light remains a permanent possibility.

201 Pliushkin is also, incidentally, the only landowner who does not enter the “town of N–.” His complete withdrawal from society has two sides: it may also become a condition for final resurrection. 202 “Он [Чичиков] вступил в темные, широкие сени, от которых подуло холодом, как из погреба” (VI, 114). 203 With regard to the meaning of Pliushkin’s name, research literature and the Russian Internet leave scarcely a stone unturned; one website even encourages readers to contribute their own explanations (“Chto oznachaet familiia Pliushkin,” Neolove.ru, https://names.neolove. ru/last_names/15/pl/pljushkin.html). No limits, then, are set to fantasy, and suggestions range from pliush (plush), through pliushka (a sweet bun) to Gogol’s fellow poet Pushkin. The most common view on the derivation of Pliushkin’s name is the association with the sweet bun—as a possible ironic contrast to Pliushkin’s joyless existence (see A. M. Ranchin, “Nekotorye soobrazheniia o posledovatel′nosti ‘pomeshchich′ikh’ glav pervogo toma poemy N. V. Gogolia ‘Mertvye dushi,” https://www.portal-slovo.ru/philology/43693.php). In his introduction to the Oxford University Press translation of Dead Souls Robert Maguire discusses the possibility of an etymological relation with “ivy”: “The name finds no obvious correspondence in any dictionary; but if it derives from plyushch, ‘ivy’, or plyush, ‘plush’ it connotes a low stage of vegetative life verging on inanimation” (Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol: Dead Souls. A Poem, trans. and ed. Christopher English [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], XXV). The German edition of the present study also supported the derivation of Pliushkin’s name from pliushch (see Urs Heftrich, Gogol’s Schuld und Sühne. Versuch einer Deutung des Romans “Die toten Seelen” [Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler, 2004], 175). However, the shift from pliushch to Pliushkin does not accord well with the phonetic laws of Russian: linguistically, a far more plausible solution is that the miser’s name derives from words—like the verb pliukhat′(sia) or pliukhnut′(sia)—based on the stem pliush-/ pliukh- (flop, plump). Another association that seems very convincing is pliukha, which in Ukrainian signifies a flesh fly that feeds on rotting meat (Sarcophaga carnaria). Pliushkin’s serfs are dropping “like flies” and there is “a multitude of flies at the bottom” of his inkpot. I am indebted to Irina Podtergera for this clue to the explanation of Pliushkin’s puzzling name.

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d)  Pliushkin and Chichikov The first lesson Chichikov’s father gave his son on his way through life was, we saw earlier (II.I), the Eighth Commandment, expressed as a curt “tell no lies.” And the narrator emphasizes that, although Chichikov “barely retained a pallid memory” of his early years, the paternal admonitions nevertheless “took deep root in his soul.”204 Pliushkin reminds him again of his father’s words and, as if this were not enough of childhood memories, adds—uniquely among the five landowners—wistful recollections of a schoolboy friendship of his own.205 This stands in sharp contrast to Manilov’s false cult of friendship and provides a further argument, within the Dead Souls spectrum of lying, for placing Pliushkin relatively close to the truth. After all, to call on memory as an advocate of truth is to approximate its Greek origins: aletheia means at root to salvage from the forgetfulness of Lethe. In recalling his untroubled youth, the ragged ancient exemplifies at the symbolic level the full arc of human depravity, and the passage is immediately followed by a digression by the narrator on the final, irrevocable downfall of humanity. At the same time the old man confronts Chichikov with his own early years—takes him back, in other words, to the absolute starting point of his journey and thus closes the narrative circle as outlined in the first part of this study. “Life, in the beginning,” the narrator tells us, “looked at him [Chichikov] somehow sourly and dourly, as if through some turbid little window drifted over with snow.” Without friends, without playmates, “eternally sitting … with a quill in his hand,” the child spent years in clerk-like drudgery.206 Gogol portrays the loneliness of the aged Pliushkin in very similar terms: “With every year more and more windows were boarded up in the house until at last but two remained unobstructed, of which one … had been pasted over with paper.”207 And the continuation of this passage is equally revealing: “With every year the important aspects of his estate disappeared more and more from his view, while his petty outlook was turned upon scraps of paper and stray feathers, which he accumulated in his room.”208

204 See VI, 224: “вот бедная картина первоначального его детства, о котором едва сохранил он бледную память”; and VI, 225: “с тех пор уже никогда он больше его [= отца] не видел, но слова и наставления заронились глубоко ему в душу.” 205 See VI, 126. 206 “с пером в руках” (VI, 224); on the first of the cited texts see note 35 on p. 42. 207 See above, p. 42. 208 “… с каждым годом уходили из вида, более и более, главные части хозяйства, и мелкий взгляд его обращался к бумажкам и перышкам, которые он собирал в своей комнате” (VI, 119).

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Paper and quill-feathers—in other words, writing materials—are the objects of Pliushkin’s increasingly obsessive gleanings. On his writing desk, the narrator tells us, lies “a great and bewildering omnium-gatherum.”209 But that is also the title of a book (Kniga vsiakoi vsiachiny, Book of Allsorts) in Gogol’s own list of works, entered by the seventeen-year-old—also a passionately indiscriminate collector—in his own hand in an exercise book filled with notes: “excerpts on architecture and art history, garden design and medicinal plants, cookery recipes, baptismal names, Russian folk-costumes, foreign systems of currency and measures, quotes from Winckelmann, lists of works by [Eugène] Scribe,” and much more.210 His last visit, we may conclude, not only takes Chichikov back to the beginnings of his own scriptorial career but allows him a surreptitious glance into the workshop of his creator. Before we follow him into that laboratory, however, it would be as well to summarize the key elements that emerge from the novel with regard to truth and lies.

209 “На бюре … лежало множество всякой всячины” (VI, 115). The formula recurs in VI, 219 when Chichikov looks back on the Public Prosecutor’s life (see p. 159). 210 Rolf-Dietrich Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: ­Rowohlt, 1985), 33. Keil provides a facsimile of the title page of Gogol’s notebook (ibid., 35).

CHAPTER 6

In the Shadow Realm of Lies

Whomsoever of the departed dead you suffer now to approach the blood will tell you true; but whom you turn away will silently retreat. Odyssey, 11, 147–149 The trickster Odysseus is sent into the realm of the shades to learn the truth about his fate. There he is confronted inescapably with his past. First reminded by Tiresias of the reason for his wanderings—his misjudgment of Poseidon and the sea god’s consequent anger—he is then approached by the apparition of his mother, followed by his former comrades in arms, who one after another disclose their knowledge in return for a drink of sacrificial blood. The trickster Chichikov undertakes a similar journey into Hades, with the difference that the figures he meets there have played no role in his past: what he faces are the moral skeletons from his own cupboard, allegorical personifications of his earlier life’s crimes and misdemeanors. As in the Odyssey, these shades could have “told him true” if he had only been prepared to listen. And that truth has two sides: each of the five landowners presents Chichikov on the one hand with a specific phase of his biography, on the other with a specific aspect of his central failing. The order in which they appear obeys a strict causality; and, reflecting their double visage, this causality is again twofold. As revenants of Chichikov’s former self they appear—as described in Part One of this study— in exact counterflow to the phases of his career; as mirrors of his wrongdoing they again follow each other with an inherent logic to which the final part of this book will be devoted. Chichikov’s primal sin is against the Christian commandment of truth. In allegorical form, Dead Souls develops a theological universe of truth and lies, unfolding with mathematical stringency every conceivable deviance from the godly norm. In this dramatic sequence of human failings the central ­position— the hub, as it were, of evil—is held by Nozdrev, the embodiment of an absolute

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non-equivalence between word and thing. On each side of this axis the milder forms of inadaequatio rei et intellectus are placed in antithetical pairs, Manilov’s disregard for things in favor of words mirrored in Sobakevich’s mistrust of words vis-à-vis the solidity of things, and Korobochka’s perilous, magical-demonic coincidence of word and thing contrasting with the not-yet-realized eventuality of their divine marriage in the persona of Pliushkin. But how does Gogol transform a symmetry that derives from the phenomenology of lying into the chronologically ordered action of a novel? Chichikov’s plan, when he sets out on his quest, is to visit two landowners, not five: from the realm of airy castles (Manilov) he will proceed to that of unshakably four-square things (Sobakevich). Symbolically, this journey will precisely trace the underlying principle of his intellectual and spiritual fraud, namely the conversion of mere names into hard cash, of dead souls into real estate. Measured against the ideal of adaequatio rei et intellectus, Chichikov’s swindle consists in seeking to convert a crass imbalance of word over thing into its no less extreme opposite: to replace the relation word > thing with the relation thing > word. But the author frustrates his character’s intention, taking him on a double diversion—not simply a wild-goose chase, but on each wayward branch what one might call a conceptual overshoot of the actual goal. From Manilov, Chichikov is borne nolens volens via Korobochka to Nozdrev. That these three landowners are bracketed together results from the manner of their deviance from the word/ thing balance: Korobochka’s fear of the magical power of word over thing is at heart no more than an intensification of the Manilovean differential between these two spheres. What happens, however, if the demon takes full control of words is demonstrated by Nozdrev—chaos. In three steps Gogol takes to its diabolical conclusion the principle on which Chichikov’s capital-raising project is based: the primacy of word over thing. That Korobochka and Nozdrev, who pursue that seminal notion to absurdity, should duly be assigned the role of Nemesis in the narrative is only logical. The second branch of the diversion is shorter. In Sobakevich—the personified absorption of spirit by matter, word by thing—Chichikov approximates his final goal as planned; but the unplanned prolongation of his journey to Pliushkin brings home the price he must pay for his unscrupulous alchemy. To reduce the world to mere things, the Imitation of Christ teaches, is to forfeit one’s own soul. The message does not yet penetrate Chichikov’s acquisitive, lying consciousness, but unconsciously it will pave the way for his later redemption. Pliushkin reminds him of the divinely ordained balance between word and thing. And Pliushkin, too, although he initially represents only an intensification of

In the Shadow Realm of Lies

S­ obakevich’s position, has an ultimate soteriological function: Gogol’s intention, as we have seen, was that he should accompany Chichikov into his final Paradiso. If we plot the two branches of Chichikov’s diversion from above—so to speak, from a heavenly perspective—another facet comes into view, namely that only those points on his progress potentially foster his spiritual growth that were not initially planned, but which take the logic of his plan to its extreme. Providence plays tricks with Chichikov’s foresight and—by gross over-fulfillment—turns it to nonsense. In fact the dialectic between human calculation and divinely governed chance governs the structure of Dead Souls as clearly as does the tension between truth and lies. The two aspects complement each other; their relation is schematically expressed in Tables 3 and 4: Table 3.  Landowner

Language type

Function of word

euphemistic‑rhetorical

end in itself

Korobochka

magical‑demonic

conjuration

Nozdrev

anarchic‑nihilistic

arbitrary

cynical‑skeptical

deception

realistic‑theological

naming

Manilov

Sobakevich Pliushkin Table 4. 

Word-thing relation

Relation type

Visit

Manilov

Landowner

word > thing

difference

planned

Korobochka

word ≥ thing

coincidence (diabolical)

unplanned

Nozdrev

word ≠ thing

indifference

unplanned

Sobakevich

word < thing

difference

planned

Pliushkin

word ≤ thing

coincidence (divine)

unplanned

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Figure 12. Fama blowing water bubbles with her trumpet Through her own lies she grows Such deeds does Fama—empty bubbles blowing, W hich through their own lies ever onward growing, Along she pulls the credulous by the nose Until swoll’n large in thin air she dissolves, As balloons rise up and snowflakes downward flutter and melt upon the earth where they must gutter.

CHAPTER 7

Judgment and Rumor

The poets make Fame a monster. … To speak now in a sad and serious manner: There is not … a place less handled, and more worthy to be handled, than this of fame. … Fame is of that force, as there is scarcely any great action, wherein it hath not a great part. … Francis Bacon, “Of Fame”1 If being human is all about talking, it’s the tittle‑tattle of life that makes the world go round, not the pearls of wisdom that fall from the lips of the Aristotles and the Einsteins. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language2 Chichikov’s arrival in the town of N– gives rise to an account in five chapters, like the five facets of a mirror, of every conceivable aspect of his cardinal fault, disregard of the divine commandment of truth. The landowners are, as it were, the walking catalogue of his sins—but he refuses to read that catalogue. And why should he? After suffering twofold shipwreck in the prehistory, his bark—to use his own metaphor—is making better progress than it has for a long time. All he need now do is wait for the legal execution of the purchase deeds, and his booty—almost four hundred souls—will be safe. At first his course seems set for success: the local court—or, in Guerney’s translation, Administrative Offices— sign and seal the dead souls as living, and any truth that dares countermand the triumphal progress of that lie is rejected by society. But more of that later. The thematic linking of truth with the local court suggested itself with particular force to Gogol for the simple reason that in Russian the two concepts o­ verlap: 1 Francis Bacon, “A Fragment of an Essay. Of Fame,” in his Essays, intro. Michael J. Hawkins (London: Dent, 1972), 174. 2 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), 4.

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pravda means both “truth” and “justice,” veritas as well as iustitia.3 That—as at first seems likely in Dead Souls—truth may finally lose out to lie is borne out by both experience and literary tradition. The topos of “banished truth” reaches back to the beginnings of Christianity and was especially popular in the Ukrainian Baroque, where it can be found in works by Gogol’s compatriots Dmitry of Rostov, Stefan Yavorsky, and Grigory Skovoroda; it also features in Comenius’s Labyrinth of the World.4 More interesting, however, than how it came down to him5 is what Gogol made of this tradition. The very logic of Chichikov’s prehistory, with its repeated stops and starts, demands that the victory of his souls—so many bodiless lies—over truth cannot last. A crime of such metaphysical import cries out for punishment, and what place could be more suitable than hell? All the more so as, in step with Gogol’s overall Dantesque plan, Chichikov happens at the moment to be there. Part One of Dead Souls is not, in fact, exclusively concerned with the banishing of truth: it also initiates the process of retribution—although that brought a problem in its own right. For, in a trilogy divided according to the hallowed scheme of ­Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, how—without a flagrant breach of convention—could the victory of the divine principle over the lie be already introduced in the domain of the Prince of Lies himself? Gogol solved the problem with elegant

3 See Dmitrij Tschižewskij, “Die vertriebene Wahrheit,” in his Aus zwei Welten (‘s Gravenhage: Mouton, 1956), 117; Wilhelm Goerdt, Russische Philosophie. Zugänge und Durchblicke (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1984), 450. On the two concepts of truth (istina and pravda) in Russian see D. Kegler, Untersuchungen zur Bedeutungsgeschichte von Istina und Pravda im Russischen (Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1975); Sabine Dönninghaus, Sprache und Täuschung. Ein Beitrag zur lexikalischen Semantik des Russischen unter Berücksichtigung kognitionstheoretischer Überlegungen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 114–118. 4 See Tschižewskij, “Die vertriebene Wahrheit”; and idem, “Das Labyrinth der Welt und Paradies des Herzens des Jan Amos Comenius. Die Thematik und die Quellen des Werkes,” in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. 2: Bohemica (Munich: Fink, 1972), 92–139. Chizhevsky himself considered the possibility that “Gogol’s Dead Souls [could] be—albeit remotely—related to the topos of banished truth” (Tschižewskij, “Die vertriebene Wahrheit,” 128), but did not pursue the idea. His reference (ibid., note 47) to his essay “Skovoroda—Puškin—Gogol′,” Die Welt der Slaven 13 (1968): 317–326, unfortunately sheds no further light on the matter, as he does not touch on the topic of truth there. 5 Gogol’s interest in the works of Dmitry Tuptalo has already been mentioned, but is only evidenced in the Correspondence of 1842. How exactly Baroque thought entered Dead Souls is difficult to establish, as many relevant works were only edited after publication of the novel (see Tschižewskij, “Die vertriebene Wahrheit,” 115; idem, “Skovoroda—Puškin— Gogol′,” 320). Nevertheless, Gogol’s affinity with the Baroque is so unmistakable (and has been so convincingly demonstrated by Gavriel Shapiro, Nikolaj Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993]) that it would be a pity to confine one’s investigations only to influences that can be established with certainty.

Judgment and Rumor

s­ implicity by dressing truth in the garments of lie. The camouflage took place on two levels, the individual and the collective. The truth, which Chichikov has so amply abused in the course of his career, catches up with him in a twofold disguise: first from the lips of Nozdrev, the incarnate “spirit that denies,” from where, however, it jumps to that “blunt monster with uncounted heads,” which from time immemorial has “[s]tuff[ed] the ears of men with false reports”—the Hydra of rumor.6 That “banished Truth” should have Dame Fama lead her retributory campaign is rooted in the symmetry of Gogol’s composition. The act of legal ratification had made Chichikov’s lie public; only if its vengeance was equally public would crime and punishment meet. And what is rumor but the public face of lie? In short, Chichikov gets exactly what he deserves. His punishment takes the form of a dramatic process whose five acts will be presented in the following five subsections of this chapter. The theatrical analogy should be taken seriously. If the first half of Dead Souls was governed by the epic principle of the journey, the second half reveals consistently dramatic structures—which is one of the reasons for the slight disparity the reader may feel between the last five chapters of the novel and the first six. The other reason is the introduction of Fama as a force in her own right, a new category of collective agency, albeit, from the point of view of literary history an old acquaintance. Her presence stretches—to name only its most prominent champions—from Homer and Pindar via Ovid and Virgil, Chaucer, Bacon, and Shakespeare to Gogol’s own day, when Kotzebue’s comedy, Deutsche Kleinstädter (The Small-Town Germans), served as an important model for his own Government Inspector.7 From that point at the latest, rumor was firmly established in Gogol’s repertoire. In the landowners Petr Ivanovich Bobchinsky and Petr Ivanovich Dobchinsky—who irrationally identify the traveler Khlestakov with the government inspector they have been waiting for— he created a veritable allegory of rumor. Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, each on his own unviable, the one existing only as the echo of the other (but an echo 6 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part Two, Induction, ll. 8 and 18. 7 The history of rumor has attracted considerable research interest in recent decades. Hans-Joachim Neubauer, Fama. Eine Geschichte des Gerüchts (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1998) provides an inspiring and relatively comprehensive treatment, including—under the heading “Makah in Russland” (ibid., 148–152)—an initial analysis of the phenomenon in Dead Souls. Surprisingly, Neubauer’s study does not mention Kotzebue, who was so important for Gogol (see Adolf Stender‑Petersen, “Gogol und Kotzebue. Zur thematischen Entstehung von Gogols ‘Revisor,’” Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 12 [1935]: 16–53). Philip Hardie’s seminal study, Rumour and Renown. Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), covers the topic from Hesiod and Homer to Alexander Pope.

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with a built-in deviation) together personify the error that accumulates when hearsay is passed on untested. From Homer to his own œuvre, then, Gogol was able to mine a rich seam of allusions; the features he gave rumor in Dead Souls reveal four particular aspects of that tradition.8 Fama—or Pheme, as she is known to Hesiod—is a goddess of unambiguously chthonic origin. In Virgil’s account: “The womb of Earth, in anger at high Heaven,/ bore her, they say, last of the Titan spawn,/ sister to Coeus and Enceladus.”9 Greeks and Romans saw her as two-faced, welcomed as fama bona, feared as fama mala;10 and her attitude to truth and lie is equally ambivalent. Any news, whether true or false, that can be quickly spread abroad is grist to her mill. This changed with the advent of Christianity: a religion for which truth is a matter of such pathos cannot but demonize a goddess of mere hearsay.11 Against this background, Fama became increasingly synonymous with the lie,12 a relation reflected in the Induction scene (quoted above) from Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part Two: Open your ears; for which of you will stop The vent of hearing, when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, Making the wind my post‑horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth:

  8 The following paragraphs are substantially indebted to Neubauer, Fama.  9 Aeneid, trans. Theodore C. Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), IV, 178–180. The Aeneid may well be a key text for Dead Souls not only because of the prominence it allows to rumor but also in its structure, which shows striking parallels with Gogol’s text. Thus, the epic journey of the first half of Dead Souls is mirrored in the “Roman odyssey” of the first part of the Aeneid. This is interrupted in book IV by the sojourn in Carthage, an extended passage that also follows dramatic principles and has frequently been treated as an independent tragedy. Moreover, in this tragedy-within-an-epic the hero (Dido) is also brought down by the machinations of Fama (I am indebted to Frank Pressler for this observation). 10 See Neubauer, Fama, 58. 11 See Tertullian, Apologeticum. Verteidigung des Christentums, trans. and comment. Carl Becker (Munich: Kösel, 1952), 83–85. 12 See Fig. 12, Hieronymus Sperling’s Baroque emblem of Fama, “Sua per mendacia crescit” (Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts [Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1967], col. 1317). The shift in the meaning of rumor-as-lie was by no means smoothly linear. Andreas Würgler concludes that in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, “so far as truth was concerned, the negative connotation of Fama (or rumor) was not yet exclusively dominant” (Andreas Würgler, “Fama und Rumor. Gerücht, Aufruhr und Presse im Ancien Régime,” Werkstatt Geschichte 15 [1996]: 28).

Judgment and Rumor

Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.13 Along with her loss of ambivalence, the goddess Fama has changed both name and gender, Shakespeare’s “loud Rumour” standing as the masculine personification of fama mala. The division of the originally Janus-headed deity into a beneficent female and a maleficent male agent is the work of the Renaissance: “Rumor stands for danger: the word symbolizes and means uproar.”14 Francis Bacon has a rather different gender emphasis in which Fama is equal in rank and danger to her brother, rebellion: “[R]ebellious actions and seditious rumors, differ not in origin and stock, but only, as it were, in sex; treasons and rebellions being the brothers, and scandal or detraction the sister.”15 Irrespective of gender, the twinning of rumor with revolt was sealed in the French Revolution: “At least for pre-industrial society it is impossible to separate rumor from uprising.”16 These four images—chthonic goddess, incarnate lie, double-gendered being, and harbinger of revolt—will cross our path again as we make our way through the five acts of Gogol’s drama, which fill the remaining chapters of Dead Souls. That drama might itself be titled “The Judgment of Rumor.”

1.  The Victory of the Lie before the Worldly Court a)  Worldly and Heavenly Courts Chapter Seven of Dead Souls relates how Chichikov, having drawn up a neat list of all their names, applies to have his purchase of souls confirmed by the local court. This simple procedure on the realistic level of the narrative is charged by the author with allegorical associations that make it into a caricature of the Last Judgment. The antithesis between the worldly and heavenly courts is noted at the beginning of the chapter, where the narrator bemoans the unpopularity of his mission, namely—instead of high-flown Romantic images—to “bring out all the things that are before man’s eyes at every minute, yet which his unheeding 13 Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part Two, Induction, ll. 1–8. 14 Neubauer, Fama, 95–98, here 96. 15 Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients, chap. 9, cited in Neubauer, Fama, 103. 16 Jean Delumeau, Angst im Abendland. Die Geschichte kollektiver Ängste im Europa des 14. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, transl. M. Hübner et al. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985), 240. See also Würgler, “Fama und Rumor.”

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eyes see not—all that fearsome, overwhelming, slimy mass of minutiae that have bogged down our life.”17 This brings him no plaudits from contemporary audiences, or, as Gogol’s narrator puts it, from “the judgment of his times” (sovremennyi sud; VI, 134)—a phrase he repeats no less than six times on a single page in an ostinato whose compositional force only becomes clear when set against the lyrical pathos of the famous concluding passage of this prelude: And for a long while yet am I destined by some wondrous power to go hand-in-hand with my strange heroes, to contemplate life in its entirety, life rushing past in all its hugeness, amid laughter perceptible to the world and through tears that are unperceived by and unknown to it! And still distant is that time when, in another tonality, awesome inspiration will break forth like a storm from my head that is clothed in sacred horror and refulgence, and when one will sense, in abashed trepidation, the majestic thunder of other eloquent words. …18 Scorned by “the judgment of his times”—Gogol gives us to understand—the writer is in truth the prophet appointed to announce, in the fullness of time, the day of divine judgment. The distant drumroll of the dies irae finds an ironic contrast in the portrait of Chichikov’s morning when, leaping out of bed, he sets about reviewing his purchases. Before withdrawing the dead souls—or the papers recording them— from their wooden resting place in his traveling chest, “he rubbed his hands with the same pleasant anticipation as that with which an incorruptible judge of a rural police court, out on the road for some investigation, rubs his on approaching a table set with all sorts of cold delicacies.”19 The local court (or here “rural police court”) is called in Russian zemskii sud (from zemlia = earth), an etymology that places it squarely in the terrestrial sphere; and to complete the parody, Chichikov, unwashed, unshaven, and clad only in a nightshirt and a pair

17 “вызвать наружу всё, что ежеминутно пред очами и чего не зрят равнодушные очи, всю страшную, потрясающую тину мелочей, опутавших нашу жизнь” (VI, 134). 18 “И долго еще определено мне чудной властью итти об руку с моими странными героями, озирать всю громадно‑несущуюся жизнь, озирать ее сквозь видный миру смех и незримые, неведомые ему слезы! И далеко еще то время, когда иным ключом грозная вьюга вдохновенья подымется из облеченной в святый ужас и в блистанье главы, и почуют в смущенном трепете величавый гром других речей” (VI, 134–135). 19 “перед шкатулкой потер руки с таким же удовольствием, как потирает их выехавший на следствие неподкупный земский суд, подходящий к закуске” (VI, 135).

Judgment and Rumor

of “morocco boots with fancy appliqués,” puts to his assembled dead the question properly reserved to the Judge of the World: “What, my hearties, have you done in your time?”20 In full accord with this imagery, the actual local court is portrayed as the shrine of a Themis who receives her guests “in negligee and dressing gown.”21 Moreover, the Chairman of this markedly insalubrious institution counts Chichikov among his “friends,”22 while he himself is compared by the narrator with Zeus, whose arbitrary rule and cronyism are granted a digression of their own: [T]he Chairman … could prolong or abridge the business day at his desire, much like ancient Zeus who, according to Homer, prolonged the days or sent quick-passing nights whenever the need arose, either to bring to a close a martial contest between the heroes he favored, or to permit them to fight to a finish.23 The Chairman’s venal subordinates are ironically termed “the incorruptible priests of Themis”; one of them, indeed, is likened to Virgil in the service of Dante.24 No doubt about it: here the principals (and principles) of law are ­pagan—this is the jurisdiction of the Inferno.

b)  Chichikov before the Worldly Court The local court of justice is now called upon to legalize Chichikov’s trading in souls, to confirm the solidity of his edifice of lies. Once again Gogol reminds us of the two pillars on which this building rests—and the instability with which it is constantly threatened. For at the seat of judgment, or on his way to it, Chichikov encounters the two landowners who—as we saw in the chapter on truth and lies—form the starting and finishing points of his originally planned ­journey.

20 “что вы … поделывали на веку своем?” (VI, 136) 21 “Фемида просто, какова есть, в неглиже и халате принимала гостей” (VI, 141). 22 The Chairman says literally: “Приятели мои не должны платить” (VI, 146). On the uncleanness of the court see VI, 141: “Ни в коридорах, ни в комнатах взор … не был поражен чистотою”. 23 “[П]редседатель … мог продлить и укоротить по его желанию присутствие, подобно древнему Зевесу Гомера, длившему дни и насылавшему быстрые ночи, когда нужно было прекратить брань любезных ему героев или дать им средство додраться” (VI, 139). 24 “неподкупные головы жрецов Фемиды” (VI, 141); “один из священнодействующих, … приносивший с таким усердием жертвы Фемиде, … как некогда Виргилий прислужился Данту” (VI, 144).

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Manilov and Sobakevich, the embodiments of empty naming and superabundant materiality, represent the two extremes he would join in transforming dead serfs into real property. At court, Gogol follows the strict conventions of emblematic art. As in an inscriptio (motto) he has the Chairman name the central theme of Chichikov’s business aspirations, to which the latter replies with a sententious subscriptio (epigram), before the emblem is completed in the pictura (image) of Manilov and Sobakevich: “So that’s how things are! That’s the way, Pavel Ivanovich! So you have made acquisitions!”   “I have,” Chichikov answered him.   “A good thing! Really, a good thing!”   “Yes, I can see myself that I could not have done better. No matter how things are, man’s goal is still indeterminate as long as he has not placed his foot firmly upon some solid foundation instead of some freethinking chimera of youth.” …   Yet, remarkably enough, there was a certain lack of assurance in his words, as though he had at the same time said to himself: “Eh, brother, but you’re lying, and mighty hard, at that!” He even avoided looking up at Sobakevich and Manilov, out of fear of detecting something on their faces. But his fears were groundless: Sobakevich’s face did not so much as twitch, and Manilov, bewitched by the apt phrase, was so pleased that he merely kept tossing his head approvingly. …25 Shortly before the finishing post, Chichikov is threatened with another fall. Significantly, the threat comes from Sobakevich, the very personification of that goal, the cynical embodiment of the solidity, which Chichikov is so keen to achieve. Seeking to paint the lie at the heart of their joint transaction in as

25 “‘Так вот как! Этаким‑то образом, Павел Иванович! так вот вы приобрели.’—‘Приобрел’,— отвечал Чичиков’”; “Да я вижу сам, что более благого дела не мог бы предпринять. Как бы то ни было, цель человека всё еще не определена, если он не стал наконец твердой стопою на прочное основание, а не на какую‑нибудь вольнодумную химеру юности”; “Но замечательно, что в словах его была всё ка­кая‑то нетвердость, как будто бы тут же сказал он сам себе: ‘Эх, брат, врешь ты, да еще и сильно!’ Он даже не взглянул на Собакевича и Манилова, из боязни встретить что‑нибудь на их лицах. Но напрасно боялся он: лицо Собакевича не шевельнулось, а Манилов, обвороженный фразою, от удовольствия только потряхивал одобрительно головою” (VI, 146; emphasis U.H.).

Judgment and Rumor

r­ealistic hues as possible, the four-square landowner almost gives the game away.26 But the lie defies even this last incursion of truth, and nothing now obstructs its solemn ratification.

c)  Lying Rules The scene as the various witnesses to the deed—among them the Archpriest and the Public Prosecutor—set their signatures beneath Chichikov’s contracts of purchase literally turns on its head the hallowed notion of the divine spirit indwelling the letters of the law. “Each one of the witnesses,” we are told, “affixed his signature, with all his attributes and ranks, some in a backhanded scrawl, some in slanting pothooks, some almost upside down, putting down such characters as were not even to be found in the Russian alphabet.”27 The world ruled by this court, Gogol suggests, is out of joint—and the point is driven home in a character sketch of Aleksei Ivanovich, Chief of Police. This “father and benefactor of the town”28 immediately conjures a round of celebratory drinks. He is Chichikov’s brother in spirit, sharing not only the latter’s acquisitive skills but even his patronymic. His ability to use his position for his own enrichment has earned him the reputation of being a “miracle worker” (chudotvorets, VI, 148)—a blasphemy whose theological implications the narrator comments with the words: “It was even hard to decide whether he had been made for the job or the job for him.”29 For the moral ideologist Gogol, the very posing of such a question denotes a world that is already topsy-turvy. As his Correspondence with Friends tells us in ever changing variations, a man should serve where God puts him, not the other way round.30 The narrator’s final judgment on the worldview prevailing in the town of N– is spoken quietly, without moral pathos. Having introduced himself at the beginning of Chapter Seven as one to whom it has not been given “to reap the plaudits of the populace,” he goes out

26 See VI, 147. 27 “Каждый из свидетелей поместил себя со всеми своими достоинствами и чинами, кто оборотным шрифтом, кто косяками, кто, просто, чуть не вверх ногами, помещая такие буквы, каких даже и не видано было в русском алфавите” (VI, 148; emphasis U.H.). 28 “Полицеймейстер был некоторым образом отец и благотворитель в городе” (VI, 149). 29 “Трудно было даже и решить, он ли был создан для места или место для него” (VI, 149). 30 For the importance of the medieval concept of ordo for Gogol see, for example, Peter Thiergen, “Gogol’s ‘Mantel’ und die Bergpredigt,” in Gattungen in den slavischen Literaturen. Beiträge zu ihren Formen in der Geschichte. Festschrift für Alfred Rammelmeyer, ed. Hans Bernd Harder and Hans Rothe (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1988), 393–412.

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of his way to attest the “thorough popularity” of the Chief of Police.31 The rule of law and order in the town, we are given to understand, is in the hands of an immediate adversary of the highest of all citable instances, the Lord of the epic world order.

d)  From Master to Slave of the Imagination After the execution of the purchase deeds, Chichikov wets the success of his mendacious transaction with champagne, vodka, and Hungarian wine. In truth, however, the cascade of toasts seals the victory of the lie over the liar—though this may remain as invisible to the rapid reader as it does to Chichikov, befuddled as he is by success and alcohol. The central message of Chapter Seven is, in fact, so subtly woven into the texture of the account that to detect it one must read the picture from the back, where dangling threads indicate the presence of a few brightly colored spots in the visible pattern. The first of these is found right at the beginning of the chapter—at the beginning, then, of Chichikov’s day. The hunter of souls is surveying his trophies, and his first step is to list in his own hand—in order to “avoid paying anything to the government clerks”—the names of all his recently bagged souls. Having completed his inventory of death, however, he is overtaken by a remarkable change. What had until now been mere numbers suddenly, in his imagination, take on individual features: When … he glanced at these papers, at these muzhiks who, verily, had been muzhiks once upon a time, … some strange feeling that he himself could not comprehend immediately took possession of him. … The muzhiks belonging to Korobochka had, almost to a man, supplemental qualifications and nicknames.  … Sobakevich’s list struck one by its unusual fullness and particularization: not one of the muzhik’s qualities had been passed over. …   All these details imparted a certain air of freshness: it seemed as if these muzhiks had been alive only yesterday. As he gazed long at the names, Chichikov’s spirit was touched. …   And his eyes stopped involuntarily at one of the names. It was one already familiar to the reader, that of Petr Saveliev, 31 Original Russian: “народны[е] рукоплескани[я]” (VI, 134), and: “совершенн[ая] народность” (VI, 150).

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or No-Respect-for-the-Pig-Trough, who had at one time belonged to Korobochka, the landed proprietress. Again Chichikov could not restrain himself from saying: “Eh, what a long fellow you are, you’ve spread over the whole line! Were you a master craftsman, or just a muzhik, and what sort of death were you carried off by? …” …   “And what about you, my darlings?” he went on, shifting his eyes to the scrap of paper whereon the runaway souls of Pliushkin were listed. … Eremei Kariakin; Nikita Volokita [Ladies’ Man], and his son, Anton Volokita. One can see by their very nicknames that these fellows know how to get around.32 Chichikov’s imagination seems here to have cut loose from his conscious will. We are told how he “could not comprehend” what had come over him; how his gaze was held “involuntarily” by one of the names; how he “could not restrain himself ” from wondering about the life that lay behind it. Two things in particular draw Chichikov’s attention: Sobakevich’s detailed description of his dead souls, and their expressive names. The names seem, for Chichikov, to exactly depict the character concerned; and in this respect he is at one with the narrator, whose digression at the end of Chapter Five set nicknames in general, and the soubriquet given Pliushkin by the muzhiks in particular, in the context of Platonic essentialism. Contemplating one of the muzhiks—and to make the recollection yet more poignant, it is one of Pliushkin’s—Chichikov is now himself overtaken by an intuition of essences. As for Sobakevich, his enthusiastic descriptions serve merely to justify the high price he is asking for his souls—his elaborations, in other words, are inspired by purely economic interests. However, while Chichikov remained unimpressed by this strategy during the actual negotiations, he now lets himself be touched by the (entirely useless) 32 “Когда взглянул он потом на эти листики, на мужиков, которые, точно, были когда‑то мужиками, … то какое‑то странное, непонятное ему самому чувство овладело им. … Мужики, принадлежавшие Коробочке, все почти были с придатками и прозвищами. … Реестр Собакевича поражал необыкновенною полнотою и обстоятельностию: ни одно из похвальных качеств мужика не было пропущено. … Все сии подробности придавали какой‑то особенный вид свежести: казалось, как будто мужики еще вчера были живы. Смотря долго на имена их, он умилился духом. … И глаза его невольно остановились на одной фамилии, это был известный Петр Савельев Неуважай‑корыто, принадлежавший когда‑то помещице Коробочке. Он опять не утерпел, чтоб не сказать: ‘Эх какой длинный, во всю строку разъехался! Мастер ли ты был или просто мужик, и какою смертью тебя прибрало?’ … ‘А вы что, мои голубчики?’—продолжал он, переводя глаза на бумажку, где были помечены беглые души Плюшкина. … ‘Еремей Карякин, Никита Волокита, сын его Антон Волокита— эти, и по прозвищу видно, что хорошие бегуны’” (VI, 135–137; emphasis U.H.).

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qualities the list reveals. The coolly calculating businessman in him should be angered at such a ploy, but Chichikov has, at this particular moment, lost all economic interest. Gogol confirms this at the end of the episode when the Chichikov wakes from his reverie with a glance at his watch and, realizing that it is already midday, regrets his inactivity and declares the entire meandering daydream to have been “bosh.”33 Contemplation is, after all, quite different from doing—that is, from the everyday concerns of the vita activa. One does not have to know more about German idealism than Gogol would have done to discern in the disinterested pleasure that temporarily severs Chichikov from the sphere of volition an aesthetic condition par excellence, namely that of contemplation of essences—the essences of his new collection.34 It is a moment of true inspiration, and stands as such in crass opposition to that other moment of “poetic insight” that sparked the entire soul-buying project: the moment in Chichikov’s prehistory when a rhyme slipped unintentionally from a secretary’s lips gels in his mind into the hard prose of a business idea. Now, having become himself the meticulous secretary of that same idea, he is borne involuntarily away on the wings of poetry. The awareness that his muzhiks “verily had been muzhiks once upon a time”35—so long as it remains free from self-interest—transforms Chichikov into a sovereign of the imaginative realm. But he need only misuse this awareness for the pursuit of his personal interests, and the imagination will subject him to its own sovereignty. At the end of Chapter Seven Gogol draws the dramatic lesson, showing Chichikov increasingly enraptured by his own fiction before losing control altogether. Having by a hair’s breadth escaped being unmasked as a confidence trickster at the local court, his fantasy is so elated by the sequence of toasts—first “to the health of the new landowner from Kherson,”36 then to 33 “‘Эхе, хе! двенадцать часов!’—сказал наконец Чичиков, взглянув на часы.—‘Что ж я так закопался? Да еще пусть бы дело делал, а то, ни с того ни с другого, сначала загородил околесину, а потом задумался’” (VI, 139; emphasis U.H.). Not accidentally, Gogol here uses an idiom related to koleso (wheel). Like a broken wheel, the “nonsensical” meditation on the fate of the serfs prevents Chichikov from getting straight on with his business plans. 34 This understanding of the aesthetic condition can be cursorily regarded as a fusion of Kant and Hegel: of Kant’s restriction of the interests of aesthetic contemplation vis-à-vis “desire” and “will” (see Critique of Judgment §§2 and 10), and Hegel’s postulate “that art is called upon … to reveal … truth” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke [Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986], vol. 13, 82)—a requirement that corrected Kant’s “failure to pose the question of truth in the field of art” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 2nd ed. [Tübingen: Mohr, 1965], 56). 35 VI, 135; on the Russian wording see note 32. 36 “Первый тост был выпит, как читатели, может быть, и сами догадаются, за здоровье нового херсонского помещика” (VI, 151).

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the (however unreal) prospect of his marrying in the town—that “he imagined he really was a landowner of Kherson.” Conveyed back to his inn, he continues to babble drunkenly of “a flaxen-fair bride with rosy-red cheeks and a little dimple on the right one, about villages in Kherson, about lots of capital.” Finally he orders Selifan to “get … all the newly resettled serfs together in order to have a roll call.” By the time he falls asleep he is “to all intents and purposes a downright landowner of Kherson.”37 In four steps the narrator demonstrates how the lie of the resettlement of the serfs gradually takes full possession of the liar. Chichikov’s order to Selifan to assemble the muzhiks for evening roll call repeats the gesture with which he began the day—this time, however, precisely not to restore the lost individuality of the dead souls in a flight of fancy: the magic of fantasy has yielded here to the tone of the prison yard. Chichikov has been intoxicated by his imagination, and the inevitable hangover follows. The marriage motif already anticipates one of the principal elements that will—to stay with that metaphor—cause Chichikov an acute headache.

2.  The Crowning of the Lie and the Banishing of Truth a)  Drama, Fama, Rumor “You can resist hand and foot, but it won’t do you any good! We’ll marry you off just the same,” the Chairman of the court teases Chichikov at the end of Chapter Seven, adding for good measure: “We don’t like to fool around!”38 And he means what he says. But it is only in Chapter Ten—with Chichikov’s flight from public talk about his supposed plan to abduct the Governor’s daughter—that the full scope of the Chairman’s words becomes clear and an astonished Chichikov learns that his marriage has already been settled by rumor—a power that is not inclined to joke. We saw earlier that, from the time of the Renaissance onward, rumor has had two faces: malicious Rumor and kindly Fama.39 Gogol shows us both in turn.

37 “[Д]олго еще у него вертелся на языке всякой вздор: белокурая невеста с румянцем и ямочкой на правой щеке, херсонские деревни, капиталы. Селифану даже были даны кое‑какие хозяйственные приказания собрать всех вновь переселившихся мужиков, чтобы сделать всем лично поголовную перекличку. … Но наконец … заснул решительно херсонским помещиком” (VI, 152). 38 “Уж как ни упирайтесь руками и ногами, мы вас женим! … Мы шутить не любим” (VI, 151). 39 See Neubauer, Fama, 98.

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In Chapter Eight Fama smiles on Chichikov, who enjoys an upturn in public sympathy; in Chapter Nine, without his at first realizing it, she turns away; and in Chapter Ten he feels the cold grimace of the god Rumor. How exactly this comes to pass will be indicated later. For now we shall simply mark the juncture on which public favor turns in this matter. Surprisingly enough, it is not the moment when Fama gets wind of the fact that the jovial stranger is a trader in the newly dead. Trumpet this as she may, it is only when another strain joins in that things really begin to dance—the strain that since Dido and Aeneas has been her favorite: the song of love, especially in its forbidden forms.40 Chichikov then becomes the talk of the town, the subject of untrammeled fancy and erotic speculation. Fama declares him a millionaire, which alone immeasurably heightens his worth for the ladies of the town. The narrator is at pains to explain that this is a question not so much of the matter of the rumor as of the actual word on which it is borne: [T]he ladies were not all avaricious schemers: the fault of the whole thing lay in the very word millionaire—not in the millionaire himself but precisely in the very word, because the very sound of the word contains, outside of any vision of moneybags, a something that has an effect not only on men who are scoundrels but on men who are fine by nature, to say nothing of men who are neither one thing nor another; in a word it has an effect on everybody. The millionaire has one great advantage: he can witness meanness that is utterly disinterested, meanness pure and unadulterated, meanness not based upon any ulterior motives whatsoever. … 41 The formulation echoes Kant’s definition of the aesthetic in the analysis of beauty from the Critique of Judgment (§§1–22), where he maintains that the aesthetic perspective is not concerned with the real existence of an object but solely with the impact of its pleasing form. Such pure gratification, however, can only arise in one who is disinterested and free from ulterior purpose. Under such conditions aesthetic perception is open to everyone. 40 See Aeneid, IV, 173–195. 41 “Впрочем, дамы были вовсе не интересанки; виною всему слово: миллионщик, не сам миллионщик, а именно одно слово; ибо в одном звуке этого слова, мимо всякого денежного мешка, заключается что-то такое, которое действует и на людей подлецов, и на людей ни сё ни то, и на людей хороших, словом на всех действует. Миллионщик имеет ту выгоду, что может видеть подлость совершенно бескорыстную, чистую подлость, не основанную ни на каких расчетах” (VI, 159; emphasis U.H.).

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Gogol evidently views Dame Fama not just through the eyes of the Church Fathers like Tertullian, for whom she was a straightforward adversary of truth. He grants her an important role in the kingdom of beauty as guardian of its negative pole. For rumor not only titillates our curiosity, it also—albeit on a low level of “meanness”—satisfies an aesthetic desire. It is only a small step from here to an inchoate therapy. For if Fama can infect us with even a rudimentary desire for beauty, another goddess—the spirit of Poetry—may be able to still that thirst in a healthier way. Many aspects of the second half of Dead Souls suggest that Gogol was, in fact, experimenting with just such a therapy. If we view Chichikov’s progress in these five chapters as a dramatic arc leading from public acceptance as an aspiring landowner to flight from that same public, we can identify three main forces shaping it:42 Chichikov’s interest in the female sex, the threat that his business interests might be unmasked, and the overwhelming power of rumor. Only when these three combine does the action take off. The first two of these forces were introduced in Chapter Seven; the third makes its entrance at the beginning of Chapter Eight, whose opening sentence reads: “Chichikov’s purchases became the subject of much talk.”43 That is the socalled inciting incident, for it is the town’s talk that drives the entire development in the second half of the novel; the other two forces merely determine its direction. The function of Chapter Eight is to show how that impulse bears Chichikov up to a height from which his fall will gather the necessary dramatic momentum; at the end of this chapter the author ties the knot of impending catastrophe. As its outer framework he chooses a festive occasion, the Governor’s ball—an artistic move that alone calls for a little consideration.

b)  Scandal and Feast44 If one collates the various definitions of “feast” given from the time of Plato (­Nomoi, 653d) to the present day, the overlap reveals two characteristics without which no feast can succeed: shared pleasure in one another’s company, and a temporally limited departure from everyday constraints.

42 See Etienne Souriau, Les deux cent mille situations dramatiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1950), 55. 43 “Покупки Чичикова сделались предметом разговоров в городе” (VI, 154). 44 The following three subsections represent an extended version of an article by the present author: Urs Heftrich, “Die Schrift an der Wand. Skandalfeste in Gogol’s ‘Mertvye duši’ und ­Dostoevskijs ‘Besy,’” in Prazd’nik”. Von Festen und Feiern in den slavischen Literaturen, ed. ­Andreas Leitner and Dagmar Burkhart (Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, and ­Vienna: Lang, 1999), 55–72.

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The socially bonding quality of feasts needs no explanation. Birthday and name-day celebrations remind one that many feasts relate to initiation rites. Ethnologically oriented research has speculated that language itself—the prime human bonding agent—may have developed from the symbolic dance figures of primordial feasts.45 In Christian minds the communicative dimension of festivity has always aroused hopes of universal reconciliation; historians, on the other hand, observe that collectives rarely celebrate their closeness without making clear who is not invited to the feast: the newly conquered, Jews, prostitutes.46 That inclusion and exclusion—Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”47 and the solidarity of terror—are close neighbors is demonstrated by the ease with which revolutionary France forged a weapon out of Rousseau’s insight into the integrative power of feasts. That feasts are essentially non-quotidian rests on the paradox of what Freud called “permitted excess”48—a limited sphere within which transgression of limits is allowed. As an invitation to “break bounds,” to “do the opposite of what is normally done,”49 feasting innately tends to chaos50 and for this reason must be subjected to strict time limits. Within this framework, excess is not only tolerated but prescribed, albeit not arbitrarily but according to a hallowed choreography. The ancient Greeks, for example, provided for the primordial festal need to test one’s limits through the ritual of the agon: “Participants at symposia competed against each other in singing, puzzling, staying awake, and

45 See J. Donovan, “The Festal Origin of Human Speech,” Mind, old series 16 (1891): 498–506; and new series 1 (1892): 325–339. 46 See Jacques Heers, Vom Mummenschanz zum Machttheater. Europäische Festkultur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1986), 16, 306. In the Russian context, Bakhtin’s theory of the feast is paramount. However—understandably enough under a totalitarian dictatorship—he tends to idealize the aspect of liberation in the temporary carnivalistic suspension of the system and concomitant, violently exclusive festal excesses. Despite this historically conditioned onesidedness, Bakhtin’s carnival concept has become something of a universal interpretive tool for literary texts, especially in Slavonic studies. The reason for its absence from the following consideration of the feast in Dead Souls is quite simple: Bakhtin’s key does not fit this lock. 47 For Durkheim, “collective effervescence” is the essence of festal celebration (cited in Paul Hugger, “Das Fest—Perspektiven einer Forschungsgeschichte,” in Stadt und Fest. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart europäischer Festkultur, ed. Paul Hugger, Walter Burkert, and Ernst Lichtenhahn [Unterägeri and Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987], 9–24, here 13). 48 Siegmund Freud, Totem and Tabu, chap. 4, in his Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2000), vol. 9, 425. 49 Roger Caillois, Der Mensch und das Heilige. Durch drei Anhänge über den Sexus, das Spiel und den Krieg in ihren Beziehungen zum Heiligen erweiterte Ausgabe, trans. B. Weidmann (Munich: Hanser, 1988), 147, 150. 50 Ibid., 147.

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drinking”;51 “kissing” competitions are even documented.52 And the danger of mixing the festive with the normal, combining play with seriousness—a danger often adduced as the main reason for the inability of our own day to celebrate feasts—was already recognized at that time. It was not unknown for revelers to decide a contested agon by striking a combatant dead.53 While that denotes a serious excess of ludic zeal, the complaint since Huizinga has more often been that “excessive seriousness”54 enables the collective “high” of intoxication only in the bloody context of war. The modern undermining of festivity has been taken up by many Russian authors from Dostoevsky through Sologub and Bely to Sorokin. Within this tradition Gogol founded a branch of his own, with five qualities of the feast described in Dead Souls occurring, for example, not only in Dostoevskij’s The Double and Demons, but also in Sologub’s Petty Demon. In all of these works the feast (1) reaches its climax in a scandal, which at the same time marks the peripeteia of the novel; (2) takes place in an atmosphere of excited social gossip creating high expectations of a successful outcome;55 (3) revolves around the question of initiation—whether an outsider shall be admitted to the festive circle; (4) is structured as an agon; and (5) demonstrates the ambivalence of festal transgression—the small step from prescribed to proscribed excess and the ease with which playfulness turns serious. The following sections will examine the function of these characteristics in the development of the central feast in Dead Souls.

c)  The Crowning of the Lie Returning now to Chichikov, we find him preparing for the Governor’s official ball. Given his rumored status as a millionaire, the event—in itself, the narrator tells us, “quite the usual thing in provincial capitals”—takes on

51 Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 77. 52 Christian Meier, “Zur Funktion der Feste in Athen im 5. Jahrhundert vor Christus,” in Das Fest, ed. Walter Haug and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1989), 569–591, here 579. 53 Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962–1970), vol. 4, 114. 54 Caillois, Der Mensch und das Heilige, 239. Huizinga already noted a “general increase in cultural earnestness … as a typical phenomenon of the nineteenth century” (Homo ludens, 184). 55 For The Double this statement requires slight modification, as the voice of gossip is parodied there by the narrator at the beginning of the “feast” chapter.

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fresh ­significance.56 Chichikov’s arrival at the ball “created an extraordinary sensation.”57 All conversation, all activity stopped as people turned to greet the newcomer. The Governor himself dropped what he was holding (among other things a small Bolognese dog). The parallels to the final scene of The Government Inspector are reinforced by the narrator’s comment: “Thus do the faces of all the bureaucrats light up when some high official arrives for an inspection of the departments entrusted to them.”58 The leadership role passes visibly from the Governor to his guest: Chichikov has become the “inspector” on whom all eyes are glued. The ball, one might say with only slight exaggeration, has become the initiation rite of the “tax collector and sinner” Chichikov to the rank of unofficial master of the town—the veritable crowning of the lie.59 And the newfound master even lets his hostess wait before paying his respects. Indeed, the Governor’s wife must actually remind him of her presence. Yet even this public flouting of “an obligation of good manners”60—an obligation that remains in force even at a Governor’s ball—passes without censure. Chichikov gets away with it because he is the center of attention—the ladies literally “encircled him … forming a glittering garland around him”; they “engrossed him” with their conversation61—a position he owes, as we have seen, wholly to the power of talk. For the ladies, Chichikov is a young man seeking a bride, and there develops among them a less than seemly competition for his favor, an agon that seriously jeopardizes the unity of the festive occasion: They [the ladies] were even beginning to squabble over him a little: having noticed that he usually took his stand near the door,

56 “дело весьма обыкновенное в губернских городах” (VI, 161). 57 “необыкновенное действие” (VI, 162). 58 “Так бывает на лицах чиновников во время осмотра приехавшим начальником вверенных управлению их мест” (VI, 162). 59 See Lk 5:30; Mt 18:17. In the Russian Bible the “tax collector” is not called tamozhnik—the term used for Chichikov’s service at the frontier—but, archaically, mytar′ (= tamozhennik, vzimatel′ poshliny za vvoz; Maks Fasmer [Max Vasmer], Etimologicheskii slovar′ russkogo iazyka, transl. O. N. Trubachev, 2nd ed. [Moscow: Nauka, 1987], vol. 3, 25). In a novel set soon after the Napoleonic Wars, Gogol could not have a mytar′—it had to be at least the modern equivalent. It seems legitimate, then, to read the description of Chichikov’s profession as playing on the Gospel texts—all the more so as the figurative sense of mytar′ according to the Russian Academy Dictionary of 1822 as well as Vasmer (= khitrets, obmanshchik) aptly fits Chichikov’s character. 60 “долг приличия” (VI, 166). 61 “Дамы тут же обступили его блистающею гирландою” (VI, 163); “дамы … закружили его своими разговорами” (VI, 166; emphasis U.H.).

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some of the ladies vied with one another and hastened to take a seat as near as possible to it, and if one of them had the good fortune to get ahead of the others in this, an unpleasant scene would almost take place, and to many of them who had wished to do the very same thing, such brazenness appeared much too revolting, my dear.62 Before the ball even began, an anonymous billet-doux63 had so stirred Chichikov’s interest that, on concluding his preparations, “although he had never danced, he performed an entrechat.” This entrechat, the narrator remarks, “had a slight and harmless sequel: the bureau shook and a clothesbrush fell off the table.”64 A narrator of Gogol’s stamp does not let so much as a clothesbrush fall off a table without malice aforethought, and we have a premonition that the fop whose brush it is will soon follow. Nor is the assurance entirely credible that Chichikov had never danced: already at Manilov’s, on concluding his first deal for souls, it was all he could do to prevent himself from “cutting a caper … something like a goat’s,”65 and the ink had scarcely dried on the confirmation of his purchases when the assembled company sought to marry him off and the presiding

62 “Даже из‑за него [Чичикова] уже начинали несколько ссориться: заметивши, что он становился обыкновенно около дверей, некоторые наперерыв спешили занять стул поближе к дверям, и когда одной посчастливилось сделать это прежде, то едва не произошла пренеприятная история, и многим, желавшим себе сделать то же, показалась уже чересчур отвратительною подобная наглость” (VI, 165f.). 63 The letter left for Chichikov by the unknown writer is full of dramatic irony, playing on the clichés of ascetic literature but at the same time anticipating Chichikov’s imminent banishment and later growth in awareness: “‘Что жизнь наша? Долина, где поселились горести. Что свет? Толпа людей, которая не чувствует’. Затем … приглашал[а] Чичикова в пустыню, оставить навсегда город” (VI, 160). Nor is it by chance that the ladies, with their “refined allegories,” cause Chichikov to literally break out in “sweat” (VI, 166), something so far achieved only by Nozdrev and Korobochka. The description of Chichikov’s arrival at the ball is equally ironic: “Всё, что ни было, обратилось к нему навстречу, кто с картами в руках, кто на самом интересном пункте разговора, произнесши: ‘а нижний земский суд отвечает за это …’. Но что такое отвечает земский суд, уж это он бросил в сторону” (VI, 162). The joke is that the worldly court has just sealed Chichikov’s success—a double entendre with respect to the zemskii sud brought out by the fact that the ladies of the town, after the appearance on the scene of Chichikov’s heavenly bride, refer to themselves as “us poor dwellers upon this earth” (“бедны[е] жител[и] земли”), while the Postmaster’s wife seems during the waltz to be “not of this mundane sphere” (“что‑то неземное”; VI, 167, 168). The ladies, moreover, pass “judgment” (“приговор”; VI, 171) on the Governor’s daughter. 64 “[Х]отя никогда не танцовал, но сделал антраша. Это антраша произвело маленькое невинное следствие: задрожал комод и упала со стола щетка” (VI, 161f.). 65 “скачок по образцу козла” (VI, 36).

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Chairman “went into a dance around him.”66 Putting it, perhaps, ­flippantly—but entirely in line with Gogol’s rigorous Christian sentiments—where woman calls and ruble rolls, the souls in Dead Souls dance—especially when those conditions coincide, as they do when the ladies scent an eligible millionaire. As if possessed, the dancers whirl around him, and in their midst Chichikov thrusts forward the very organ that would lead him to the hidden letter-writer—his nose (Gogol’s use of metaphor allows a certain double entendre at this point): “However, which one of them wrote that letter?” Chichikov wondered as he stood before them and had even craned forward for a better look when a whole procession of elbows, cuffs, sleeves, ends of ribbons, perfumed chemisettes, and dresses scraped his very nose. The gallopade was going full blast. …67 This much, then, is clear: the agon among the ladies for Chichikov’s favor is in full swing, and festal high spirits have led to isolated transgressions on the part of both Chichikov and those competing for his attention. But, at this point, the cardinal position in which rumor has placed him is still secure: Chichikov’s initiation as sovereign of the provincial town seems to have succeeded.

d)  The Banishing of Truth The situation changes at a blow when he actually decides the agon of the ladies. Chichikov’s choice falls on the only one who joins in neither the competition nor the dance: the lately arrived Governor’s daughter, incarnation of heavenly, not earthly love. Chichikov has met his Beatrice once before, as we know, and the unexpected sight of her at the ball throws him violently off the path of social manners and graces. His world goes into reverse. The dance—a moment ago a source of fascination—is now an obstacle, and quite a dangerous one, on his way to the object of his desire: He didn’t so much as look at the figures the ladies performed as they danced but kept ceaselessly rising on tiptoes to see if he 66 See VI, 151. 67 “Чичиков, стоя перед ними, думал: ‘Которая, однако же, сочинительница письма?’—и высунул было вперед нос; но по самому носу дернул его целый ряд локтей, обшлагов, рукавов, концов лент, душистых шемизеток и платьев. Галопад летел во всю пропалую” (VI, 164; emphasis U.H.).

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could find where the engrossing blonde had gone; he bent his knees a little, too, keeping a sharp lookout between the shoulders and backs of the dancers; finally his search was successful and he caught sight of her, sitting together with her mother. … Apparently he wanted to take them by frontal assault …, the fact remains that he resolutely pressed forward, regardless of everything. The tax-farmer received such a shove from him that he staggered and barely managed to balance himself upright on one foot: if he hadn’t succeeded in doing so, he would have toppled over a whole row of others after him. … Chichikov darted past the mazurka, almost at the very heels of the dancers, and made directly for the spot where the Governor’s lady and her daughter were sitting.68 In his clumsiness, Chichikov, otherwise so adroit (lovkii), is in real danger of capsizing the feast. Suddenly “the whole ball … had … moved somewhere far off.”69 He has, in other words, overstepped not just a boundary within the framework of the feast, but that framework itself—a radical transgression from which he will no longer be able to find his way back into the festive community. Step by irreversible step he is excommunicated; and his downfall is engineered by the same force that impelled him into the center of the social gathering, the power of talk: All the ladies found such conduct on Chichikov’s part not at all to their liking. One of them purposely passed by him, … at the same time a rather pointed and malicious remark issued together with the fragrance of violets, from the lips of a lady behind him. Whether he really had not heard it, or merely made believe he had not heard it, doesn’t matter; this failure to hear it was still a bad thing, inasmuch as one should value the opinion of ladies. He did repent this, but only later on, and consequently too late.70 68 “Он даже не смотрел на круги, производимые дамами, но беспрестанно подымался на цыпочки выглядывать поверх голов, куда бы могла забраться занимательная блондинка; приседал и вниз тоже, высматривая промеж плечей и спин, наконец доискался и увидел ее, сидящую вместе с матерью. … Казалось, как будто он хотел взять их приступом; … только он протеснялся решительно вперед, несмотря ни на что; откупщик получил от него такой толчок, что пошатнулся и чуть‑чуть удержался на одной ноге, не то бы, конечно, повалил за собой целый ряд. … Чичиков прошмыгнул мимо мазурки почти по самым каблукам и прямо к тому месту, где сидела губернаторша с дочкой” (VI, 168f.). 69 “вдруг сделался чуждым всему, что ни происходило вокруг него” (VI, 167). 70 “Всем дамам совершенно не понравилось такое обхождение Чичикова. Одна из них нарочно прошла мимо его …; в то же самое время позади его из одних дамских уст

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The ensuing scandal is not weighty enough to seriously disturb the balance of the feast itself. The social structure is, in Dead Souls, so flagrantly robust that it without difficulty sheds any foreign body found in its midst and even gains strength in doing so. The narrator registers explicitly that “[t]he neglect shown by Chichikov, though it was almost unintentional, actually brought about among the ladies that accord which had been on the verge of collapse at the time they had been vying for a seat nearest him.”71 The scandal brings Nozdrev onto the scene—the only landowner with whom Chichikov failed to clinch a deal. And Nozdrev immediately blurts out Chichikov’s secret: “Ah, … the landowner of Kherson!” he kept shouting. … “Well? Have you done a great deal of trading in dead souls?” And to drive things home, he makes to plant a kiss on Chichikov’s “snow-white cheek,” an act the latter, however, fends off with a hearty shove.72 Soon afterward, Nozdrev is led out, as “his condition was becoming far too scandaleuse”: he had even “begun grabbing the dancers by their skirts and coat flaps.”73 Nozdrev, too, transgresses permitted boundaries; but he has already fed enough new material into the chatter about Chichikov to ensure his ultimate fall.74 The ex-customs-officer, who has so amply demonstrated his corrupt understanding of boundaries, is brought down by a figure who, as became clear on the tour of Nozdrev’s estate, does not even know what a boundary is.75 In the scheme of salvation history, Chichikov’s fall is a step toward his eventual ascent: the tax-collector of the biblical parable must be brought low before he can rise.76 That Gogol intended the religious association is evident from the parallel between this scene and Jesus’s betrayal by Judas (“The one I shall kiss is изнеслось, вместе с запахом фиялок, довольно колкое и язвительное замечание. Но, или он не услышал в самом деле, или прикинулся, что не услышал, только это было нехорошо; ибо мнением дам нужно дорожить: в этом он и раскаялся, но уже после, стало быть поздно” (VI, 170). 71 “Пренебрежение, оказанное Чичиковым, почти неумышленное, восстановило между дамами даже некоторое согласие, бывшее было на краю погибели после наглого завладения стулом” (VI, 171). 72 Nozdrev shouts: “А, херсонский помещик, херсонский помещик! … Что? много наторговал мертвых?” (VI, 172) and “Да, Чичиков, уж ты не противься, одну безешку позволь напечатлеть тебе в белоснежную щеку твою” (ibid.). 73 “поведение его чересчур становилось скандалёзно” (VI, 174). 74 Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, “Nikolaj Gogol: Die toten Seelen,” in Der russische Roman, ed. Bodo Zelinsky (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1979), 103, aptly calls Nozdrev the “instigator of the gossip.” 75 See above, p. 37. Nozdrev, as observed earlier, embodies not only the trangression of limits as such but also the competitive principle of the agon—to win at any price, irrespective of purpose—while Chichikov represents the purpose-directed version of that principle. Thus, in relation to both agon and boundary transgressions they are perfect parallels to each other. 76 See Mt 21:31; Lk 18:13–14.

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the man …”).77 Chichikov’s incongruity as a Christ-figure does not in itself rule out the possibility of a later imitatio Christi: it is noticeable, in fact, that although the fluent liar most certainly raises his hand against the denouncer, he does nothing to deny the denunciation.78 The incident compels Chichikov to leave the ball, a temporary flight from the world that for a socialite like him amounts to a break with his previous existence. Withdrawn into the solitude of his room at the inn, he rejects balls in general as “rubbishy foolishness” and “sin”—“May the Devil,” he concludes, “take all of you” who invented them.79 That Chichikov here expresses Gogol’s own zealous Christian sentiments will be clear to every reader of the latter’s Correspondence with Friends. But as an artist Gogol was still sufficiently objective to weave his own personal perspective into that of his work, availing himself of a roundabout means he had already used in The Government Inspector, 80 allowing Chichikov to assume for a moment the mantle of a writer—and of one whose pen impeccably maintains the adaequatio rei et intellectus of which we spoke earlier: “There, what if we were to suppose that some writer or other had gotten it into his head to describe all this scene, as is? Why, even there, even in a book, it would turn out just as senseless as it is in nature.”81 Already during the ball Chichikov was momentarily transformed by the vision of his Beatrice into a “poet”; and toward the end of the festivities the vox populi—albeit erroneously—ascribed to him “certain satirical verses on the dancing elite.”82 For Gogol, we may conclude, the role of poet entails distance from the vanitas mundi. Such distance is in any case a precondition for the recognition of truth. Nozdrev is ejected from the society whose eyes he has opened to Chichikov’s business, and Chichikov himself must take refuge in the four walls of his hired 77 Mt 26:48. 78 Thus Chichikov’s reaction stands between the two patterns prefigured in Christ’s betrayal: Peter wields his sword and defends himself against denunciation with a threefold lie. 79 “Просто дрянь бал, … чорт знает что такое: взрослый, совершеннолетний вдруг выскочит весь в черном … как чортик” (VI, 174); “Нет, право … после всякого бала, точно, как будто какой грех сделал” (VI, 175; emphasis U.H.). 80 In Gogol’s play, the City Captain similarly expresses his fear of pen-pushing clerks who could turn him into a comic character (Government Inspector, V:8). 81 “Ну, если бы, положим, какой‑нибудь писатель вздумал описывать всю эту сцену так, как она есть? Ну, и в книге, и там была бы она так же бестолкова, как в натуре” (VI, 175; emphasis U.H.). 82 “Видно, так уж бывает на свете, видно, и Чичиковы, на несколько минут в жизни, обращаются в поэтов; но слово поэт будет уже слишком” (VI, 169); «В довершение бед какой‑то из молодых людей сочинил тут же сатирические стихи на танцовавшее общество. … Эти стихи были приписаны тут же Чичикову” (VI, 171).

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room before his eyes open to the business of society. Truth, conversely, has no abiding place in society: the only path open to it is exile. Only in a mask—the mask of a lie—can it take its stand against the lie. And it is under those false colors that Gogol now launches the campaign for truth’s eventual victory: This bit of news [about the purchase of dead souls] appeared so strange that all those present stopped still, with some wooden, foolishly questioning air. Chichikov noted that many of the ladies exchanged winks among themselves with malevolent, caustic smiles. … That Nozdrev was an arrant liar everybody knew, and it wasn’t at all a rare thing to hear him spout downright nonsense; but mortal man … really, it is hard to comprehend how mortal man is fashioned: no matter how vulgar a bit of news may be, just so long as it be news he’ll inevitably impart it to some other mortal man, even though it be for no other purpose than to say: “Just see what a lie they’ve spread around!” And the other mortal man will with pleasure incline his ear, although he’ll say in his turn: “Yes, that’s a downright vulgar lie, unworthy of any attention whatsoever!” And right after that he won’t waste an instant setting out in search of a third mortal man, so that he may, after having retailed the story to him, exclaim in chorus with the latter in noble indignation: “What a vulgar lie!” And this story will inevitably make the rounds of the whole town, and all the mortal men, no matter how many of them there may be, will inevitably have their bellyful of talk, and then will admit that the matter doesn’t deserve any attention and isn’t even worth talking about.83 83 “Эта новость так показалась странною, что все остановились с каким‑то деревянным, глупо‑вопросительным выражением. Минуты на две настала какая‑то непонятная тишина, Чичиков заметил, что многие дамы перемигнулись между собою с какою‑то злобною, едкою усмешкою. … Что Ноздрев лгун отъявленный, это было известно всем, и вовсе не было в диковинку слышать от него решительную бессмыслицу; но смертный, право, трудно даже понять, как устроен этот смертный: как бы ни была пóшла новость, но лишь бы она была новость, он непременно сообщит ее другому смертному, хотя бы именно для того только, чтобы сказать: ‘Посмотрите, какую ложь распустили!’, а другой смертный с удовольствием преклонит ухо, хотя после скажет сам: ‘Да, это совершенно пошлая ложь, не стоящая никакого внимания!’—и вслед за тем сей же час отправится искать третьего смертного, чтобы, рассказавши ему, после вместе с ним воскликнуть с благородным негодованием: ‘Какая пошлая ложь!’ И это непременно обойдет весь город, и все смертные, сколько их ни есть, наговорятся непременно досыта и потом признают, что это не стóит внимания и не достойно, чтобы о нем говорить” (VI, 172–173).

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Nozdrev’s revelation of the truth has a similar effect on the festive gathering as the heralding of the second (genuine) inspector in the famous dumb scene from The Government Inspector. If the first allusion to Gogol’s comedy compared ­Chichikov’s arrival at the ball with that of a high government official,84 this second reference implies that the force that brings him down is the same that raised him so high: his public impact. Chichikov stumbles over the power to which he owes everything; in that respect his fate closely reflects Max Scheler’s definition of tragedy.85 However, the parallels to classical drama go further: they lie not only in the basic structure of the conflict but also in its detailed development. After introducing Chichikov’s rumored purchases as the inciting incident at the beginning of Chapter Eight, Gogol now, at the end of that chapter, ties the dramatic knot. The last passage cited shows how all three of the forces driving the plot—­ Chichikov’s relations with women, the broadcasting of his scam with souls, and the self-aggrandizing force of rumor—can suddenly intertwine. The complication has not yet broken out openly: the power of Fama is initially presented by the narrator in potency rather than action; but all is now ready for the goddess to embark on her campaign of revenge for banished truth.

3.  The Traducing of the Lie by Rumor a)  The Judgment of Rumor Fama’s revenge is not random. It starts at the precise moment when Chichikov misses his last chance of escaping from the noose he has woven for himself. Retreating to his room, he comes close to realizing his own fault in the affair: “having analyzed it clearly, he perceived that he himself had been in part the cause of it.”86 In this moment of self-knowledge, Chichikov can no longer take refuge in the calming formula—“that a foolish word didn’t mean a thing”87—with which he had sought to conceal the danger of Nozdrev’s revelation. That phrase touches, in fact, to the core of his error: semantic recklessness—the delusion that words can

84 See VI, 162. 85 “It is, then, tragic in the strictest sense when a force that brings about the achievement of a high positive value is within that very process responsible for the annihilation of that value” (Max Scheler, “Zum Phänomen des Tragischen,” in his Vom Umsturz der Werte, 2nd rev. ed., vol. 1 [Leipzig: Der Neue Geist, 1923], 235–267, here 249). 86 “разобравши дело ясно, он видел, как причиной этого был отчасти сам” (VI, 175). 87 “что глупое слово ничего не значит” (VI, 175).

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Figure 13. Winged Nemesis on a wheel, in her left hand a harness, her right forearm raised Insult no one by either word or deed The merciless goddess of wrath Pursuing mankind on foot, Her arm with one hand raised, In the other bridle and band, She gives us to understand That none should his neighbor grieve By either word or deed, But at all times temperance keep.

be arbitrarily manipulated. In terms of classical drama, that is Chichikov’s tragic flaw, his hamartia; and the correlative opportunity offered him for anagnorisis goes unused. His sense of responsibility for his own precarious position evokes no feelings of guilt, a point the narrator emphasizes with a smugly well-timed aside: He did not, however, get angry at himself, and, of course, was right in this. We all of us have a slight weakness of sparing ourselves a little; we’d rather try to seek out some fellow man on whom we may vent our chagrin. … And so ­Chichikov, too, speedily found a fellow man. … This fellow man was none ­other than Nozdrev. …88 88 “На себя, однако же, он не рассердился, и в том, конечно, был прав. Все мы имеем маленькую слабость немножко пощадить себя, а постараемся лучше приискать

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But Nozdrev was one of the two embodiments of Nemesis in Dead Souls, and no hero has ever challenged that goddess with impunity. Chichikov’s punishment for the willful suppression of his crime follows without delay, and this, too, Gogol times to perfection; for while Chichikov is still “heartily reviling” Nozdrev and his “entire family tree,” the second incarnation of Nemesis, Korobochka, enters on creaking wheels at the other side of the town.89 “[O]vercome by … uneasiness about a possible raw deal” on the part of Chichikov, she has decided, “after losing sleep for three nights in a row,” to drive into town, where she duly arrives at dead of night.90 Korobochka adds nothing of substance to the impending intrigue; she simply confirms the news, already spread abroad by Nozdrev, of Chichikov’s dealing in souls. This may serve as an extra boost to Fama, but the dramatic development would proceed without it. At the allegorical level, however, her contribution is so much the greater: after the expulsion of the male initiator of the rumor, its female principle arrives. Korobochka embodies not only the chthonic element of Fama,91 she shares her sleeplessness and predilection for traveling at night. Thus Virgil: At night she spreads midway ’twixt earth and heaven her pinions in the darkness … nor e’er to happy slumber gives her eyes. …92 Gogol, too, splits rumor along gender lines: “Amid all this town tittle-tattle there suddenly turned out to be two diametrically opposed schools of thought, and какого‑нибудь ближнего, на ком бы выместить свою досаду. … Так и Чичиков скоро нашел ближнего. … Ближний этот был Ноздрев” (VI, 175–176). 89 “Но в продолжение того, как он сидел в жестких своих креслах, … угощая усердно Ноздрева и всю родню его … —в это время на другом конце города происходило событие, которое готовилось увеличить неприятность положения нашего героя” (VI, 176; emphasis U.H.).—That Nemesis literally “rolls up” accords with emblematic tradition; see Fig. 13: “Winged Nemesis with Harness Standing on a Wheel” (Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, col. 1811). See also Simon Karlinsky’s astute observation: “Bely makes a convincing case for Korobochka being the double of Chichikov’s cassette (shkatulka): the fact that she catches him with the cassette open, the similarity of the description of the insides of the cassette and the insides of her coach, the danger that her arrival in town constitutes to his most precious possession. As Bely puts it, she is the very opposite of the fairy-godmother even if she does travel in a pumpkin-like conveyance. In fact, Korobochka is not only the double but also the nemesis of the cassette” (Simon Karlinsky, “Portrait of Gogol as a Word Glutton, with Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures,” California Slavic Studies 5 [1970]: 178). 90 “Старушка, вскоре после отъезда нашего героя, в такое пришла беспокойство насчет могущего произойти со стороны его обмана, что, не поспавши три ночи сряду, решилась ехать в город” (VI, 177). 91 For Fama as a “daughter of Earth” (Neubauer, Fama, 61; Aeneid, IV, 178) see Introduction to Part Three of this book. 92 Aeneid, IV, 184–185 (trans. see note 9).

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two diametrically opposed parties were suddenly formed: the masculine and the feminine.”93 Given the traditional dichotomy between Fama and Rumor this hardly seems surprising. On closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that the traditional division into a friendly goddess and a malicious god is not what the author intends. Between the masculine and feminine aspects of gossip he draws a quite different boundary.94

b)  Fama—Masculine and Feminine Chichikov deals in dead souls: that—no less, but no more—is the message that issues from Nozdrev and Korobochka, the male and female originators of rumor, at the end of Chapter Eight. By the end of Chapter Ten, Chichikov is reputed to be an abductor of young women, a forger of banknotes, a possible gang leader, and most extravagantly of all, Napoleon himself. This impressive metamorphosis is the outcome of Fama’s activities in the town. Typical of her workings, as Hans‑Joachim Neubauer has perceptively demonstrated,95 is the way she deletes all evidence that might lead back to her source. Thus the qualitative jump from report to rumor—from buyer of souls to would-be abductor—occurs in a conversation between two personages whom the narrator introduces with elaborate anonymity as the “lady who was simply agreeable” and the “lady agreeable in all respects.”96 It is of the nature of Fama to cover her traces in this way. Nor is there any contradiction in the fact that the two ladies appeal to allegedly impeccable sources: the “lady who was simply agreeable” has her information from the Archpriest’s wife, who has it from Korobochka herself. Gogol has carefully arranged for the reader to gain this knowledge only at third hand. What Korobochka actually said about Chichikov’s nocturnal visit to her house remains in darkness; we only receive it at the third remove of hearsay.97 93 “В городской толковне оказалось вдруг два совершенно противоположных мнения и образовалися вдруг две противоположные партии: мужская и женская” (VI, 191). 94 On the gender problem in Dead Souls see James B. Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. the chapters “The Masters and the Ladies” and “The ‘Paternal’ Theme.” 95 See Neubauer, Fama, 149. Some aspects not explicitly mentioned by Neubauer will be added here; the point will not otherwise be further pursued. 96 The two ladies are called in Russian “дама приятная во всех отношениях” and “просто приятная дама” (VI, 179). 97 The narrator suggests that Korobochka herself remained true to the facts. When the town fathers question her about Chichikov, she simply repeats what actually happened (VI, 195). In other words, the rumor receives its first dramatic enrichment when it is passed on by the Archpriest’s wife to the “lady who was simply agreeable.”

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At every step in the process of transmission the message is enriched with new associations, for at every step the gossipers have different angles and interests, which overlay and finally reinscribe the original text. Under all the glosses and fingerprints of this collective authorship the identity of the first witness becomes illegible. Gogol gives us a live excerpt of the process: “Ah, Anna Grigorievna. … Do but listen to what the Archpriest’s wife told me. A certain landowner, she says, by the name of Korobochka, arrived at her house, frightened out of her wits and pale as death, and she has a story to tell—and what a story! Do but listen, it’s for all the world like a novel. …”   “But what about Korobochka? Why, is she young and goodlooking?”   “Not in the least; she’s an old woman.”   “Ah, how charming! So he’s going after an old woman now? …” …   “But it isn’t that, Anna Grigorievna, it isn’t at all the way you suppose. Just imagine this to yourself: a man armed from head to foot appears on the scene, in the style of the great brigand Rinaldo Rinaldini, and demands: ‘Sell me,’ he says, ‘all the souls who have died!’ …”98 The ladies evidently share a dominant interest: to flesh out their text into a novel, one in the erotic, the other in the romantic-robber direction. Hence the ostensibly surprising (and illogical) transition, a little later in their conversation, from soul trading to abduction; for abduction of a young woman amounts to erotic robbery and as such constitutes a prime combination of the two genres. Doing so, it provides for the “agreeable ladies” a perfect psychological motive for their embellishment of the original text. With this, too, Gogol regales us in detail: “Very well, then, listen to what sort of thing these dead souls are,” said the lady who was agreeable in all respects, and her visitor, at these words, became all attention. … 98 “‘Ах, Анна Григорьевна, … слушайте только, что рассказала протопопша. Приехала, говорит, к ней помещица Коробочка, перепуганная и бледная, как смерть, и рассказывает, и как рассказывает, послушайте только, совершенный роман …’—‘Да что Коробочка? разве молода и хороша собою?’—‘Ничуть, старуха.’—‘Ах, прелести! Так он за старуху принялся …’—‘Да ведь нет, Анна Григорьевна, совсем не то, что вы полагаете. Вообразите себе только то, что является вооруженный с ног до головы вроде Ринальда Ринальдина и требует: “Продайте”,—говорит,—“все души, которые умерли”’” (VI, 183).

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  Thus a Russian squire, a great lover of dogs and an inveterate hunter, on approaching a forest out of which a hare tracked down by beaters is about to emerge, becomes all transformed, with his mount and long whip, within one congealed moment, into gunpowder ready to be touched off at any instant. …   “The dead souls are—” began the lady who was agreeable in all respects. …   “Ah, do tell me, for God’s sake!”   “All this is simply an invention that serves as a blind; but the real thing is this: he wants to carry off the Governor’s daughter.” …   This conclusion was truly unexpected and an unusual one in every way.99 Between the lines Gogol suggests exactly on whom the ladies have drawn for their superficially irrational but psychologically convincing fabrication. Their flash of inspiration comes not from above but from the earth-bound realm of the hunter (favorite quarry hares), dog-lover, and explosively choleric ­landowner.100 Looking for Chichikov’s potential accomplices, they instinctively come up with the name of Nozdrev.101 In other words, their inspiration is from the devil. ­Gogol’s conclusion is the same as in The Government Inspector: the infusion into a piece of initially accurate information of the spark of confusion that will ignite a storm of calumny is the work of the Evil One.102 But there is nothing transcendent about that evil one: it sits deep in each of us. With the ladies, this demon consists in a tendency to spin out everything they hear until it is “for all the world like a novel,” a “finished … masterpiece” to whose impressive consistency they then themselves fall victim, much as the scientist  99 “‘Ну, слушайте же, что такое эти мертвые души’,—сказала дама приятная во всех отношениях, и гостья при таких словах вся обратилась в слух. … Так русский барин, собачей и иора-охотник, подъезжая к лесу, из которого вот-вот выскочит оттопанный доезжачими заяц, обращается весь с своим конем и поднятым арапником в один застывший миг, в порох, к которому вот‑вот поднесут огонь. … ‘Мертвые души …’—произнесла во всех отношениях приятная дама. … ‘Ах, говорите ради бога!’—‘Это, просто, выдумано только для прикрытья, а дело вот в чем: он хочет увезти губернаторскую дочку.’ Это заключение, точно, было никак неожиданно и во всех отношениях необыкновенно” (VI, 184–185). 100 See VI, 74: “‘Вот на этом поле’,—сказал Ноздрев …,—‘русаков такая гибель, что земли не видно; я сам своими руками поймал одного за задние ноги’”. 101 See VI, 187. 102 See Andreas Ebbinghaus, “Konfusion und Teufelsanspielungen in N. V. Gogol’s ‘Revizor,’” Russian Literature 34 (1993): 291–310.

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can succumb to the suggestive force of his own hypothesis.103 “The plot,” we read, “… with every day … took more definitive forms, and at last, just as it was, in all its definitiveness, was brought to the very ears of the Governor’s lady herself.”104 “Novel,” “masterpiece,” “form,” “plot,” “definition”—Gogol describes the ladies’ conversation in the unmistakable terms of a quasi-artistic activity. The at first sight absurd conclusion of the lady who was agreeable in all respects is meant, then, less as an example of what chauvinists like to call “feminine logic”105 than as the logic of an artistic creativity that is not bound by the constraints of fact: “The lady who was agreeable in all respects reacted firmly by claiming to know nothing. She did not know how to lie; to suppose something or other was another matter, but even that held good only in a case where the supposition was based upon an inner conviction.”106 A woman’s imagination, the narrator suggests, knows only one limit: that of the inner conviction, formal perfection, and “orderliness” of its ultimate product.107 As an aesthetic end-in-itself, rumor, in this scheme of things, is sui generis. Gogol left it to the men of the town to name this aesthetic for what in his opinion it was: the work of the devil. Not that the masculine in Dead Souls comes off much better than the feminine in terms of insight: the town fathers are as much in the dark as to the real point of Chichikov’s purchases as are their ladies. The sole force driving their reactions is “perpetual apprehension,”108 their one point of orientation the law of causality. But the logic of cause and effect can find no way through the thicket of assumptions set by rumor: There’s no logic to dead souls; how, then, can one buy up dead souls? … And how on earth has the Governor’s daughter gotten mixed up in here? If he really did want to carry her off, then why 103 For “совершенный роман” see note 98; VI, 191 speaks of “оконченная картинка” (emphasis U.H.). In VI, 188 Gogol compares women’s novel production with the autosuggestion of the “savant” or scientist. 104 “Сюжет … принимал с каждым днем более окончательные формы и наконец так, как есть, во всей своей окончательности, доставлен был в собственные уши губернаторши” (VI, 191–192; emphasis U.H.). 105 This is confirmed by the comparison between women’s production of rumor and men’s scientific activity. 106 “Во всех отношениях приятная дама прямо отозвалась незнанием. Она не умела лгать: предположить что‑нибудь,—это другое дело, но и то в таком случае, когда предположение основывалось на внутреннем убеждении” (VI, 188). 107 “Но как ни вооружались и ни противились мужчины, а в их партии совсем не было такого порядка, как в женской” (VI, 192; emphasis U.H.). 108 “природа мужчины, … исполненная беспрерывных сомнений и вечной боязни” (VI, 192).

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did he have to buy up dead souls for that? And if he really wanted to buy up dead souls, then why would he want to be carrying off the Governor’s daughter? … What in the world are things coming to when, before you can … turn around, they’ve already up and spread a story like that? … However, spread it they did, therefore there must have been some reason to it. … But what reason can there be to dead souls? Why, there just isn’t any! … This is, simply—oh, may the Devil take it all!109 Yet without even remotely grasping the fact, the town fathers have provided an accurate theological positioning of rumor. Perceiving the utter contingency of the connection between the purchase of souls and the plan to abduct the Governor’s daughter, they consign the whole business to Satan.110 Moreover, in pursuing only one aspect of the rumor, namely Chichikov’s obscure object of trade, they choose a path that would, if they followed it, lead to a solution of the mystery. As it is, stumbling blindly along, they mark out the beginnings of the way for the perceptive reader.

c)  The Hermeneutics of Rumor In the hermeneutics of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the four senses of a text was a common starting point of exegesis.111 The first step to understanding a text was considered to be determination of its literal sense; followed by the allegorical sense, as the deeper meaning intended by the author; the

109 “Логики нет никакой в мертвых душах, как же покупать мертвые души? … и зачем вмешалась сюда губернаторская дочка? Если же он хотел увезти ее, так зачем для этого покупать мертвые души? Если же покупать мертвые души, так зачем увозить губернаторскую дочку? … Однако ж разнесли, стало быть, была же какая‑нибудь причина? Какая же причина в мертвых душах? даже и причины нет. Это выходит, просто: … чорт побери!” (VI, 189–190). On this point see Walter Koschmal, “Modell oder Wirklichkeit? Die Entgrenzung der Objektwelt in Gogol’s ‘Mertvye duši,’” Russian Literature 11 (1982): 352. 110 On the diabolical connotations of contingency in the Christian philosophical tradition see Hannah Arendt, Vom Leben des Geistes, vol. 2: Das Wollen (Munich and Zürich: Piper, 1989), 36, 129; Carl Friedrich Geyer, Leid und Böses in philosophischen Deutungen (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1983), passim; Rüdiger Safranski, Das Böse, oder Das Drama der Freiheit (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1997), 220; and relevant articles in Gerhart v. Graevenitz and Odo Marquard, Kontingenz (Munich: Fink, 1998). 111 For a recent plea for the critical rehabilitation of the “four textual senses” see Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Lesen und Interpretieren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 119–139.

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moral sense, as the text’s admonitory impact on the reader; and the anagogical sense, as the outlook on a future common to both author and reader. That Gogol availed himself of this traditional model in Dead Souls is suggested not only by the exemplary role played by Dante’s Divina Commedia in its conception, but also by his “Four Letters on Dead Souls,” in the first of which his vision of Russia as wholly populated by dead souls provides an allegorical interpretation of that figure.112 The second and third letter in that series concern the moral turnaround Gogol envisaged as resulting from the mirror his epic poem held up to himself and his homeland; and the fourth letter—written in the context of the burning of the second volume of his work—has a distinctly anagogical sense in terms of the hope of resurrection. The fourfold sense of Gogol’s novel is, moreover, rooted in its very structure. All we know of his plans for Parts II and III of Dead Souls reinforces the assumption that he intended to take the reader along a chronological path up those same four steps. At the end of Part One he reveals the literal sense of the dead souls in terms of Chichikov’s intention—hidden from the reader for ten ­chapters— in buying them. At the same time he releases Chichikov from the confines of the town of N– into the wide expanses of Russia and, in the famous image of the flying troika, expresses allegorically that this is no story of a single person or province, but of Russia itself. The transition from Part Two to Part Three would duly feature Chichikov’s moral conversion and thus prepare the way for his final ascent (anagoge) and redemption. Against this background it takes on new significance when the chronicler of Dead Souls remarks that Chichikov’s widespread purchases stimulated the ladies to “the most intricate and refined allegories,” the men, on the other hand, to reflect “that there’s a moral here.”113 Moreover, when the lady who was agreeable in all respects launches into the orbit of urban gossip her absurd conjecture about Chichikov’s abduction plan, she not only applies the allegorical method to the report of the dead souls, but in doing so provides a definition of allegory itself: “but this isn’t at all a matter of dead souls: there’s something else going on, hiding behind all this.”114 The town fathers, for their part, cling to the moral line of argument, reasoning that—whatever the dead souls signified—there must be: 112 “Точно, как бы вымерло всё, как бы в самом деле обитают в России не живые, а какие‑то мертвые души” (VIII, 287). 113 The key concepts are expressed even more strongly in the original: “вот тут‑то и есть мораль, тут‑то и заключена мораль” (VI, 154–155); and “дамы так заняли и закружили его своими разговорами, подсыпая кучу самых замысловатых и тонких аллегорий, которые все нужно было разгадывать” (VI, 166; emphasis U.H.). 114 “здесь не мертвые души, здесь скрывается что‑то другое” (VI, 184; emphasis U.H.).

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“something quite nasty, quite bad about them”—something whose upshot was that these gentlemen suddenly sought out in themselves such sins as they hadn’t even committed. The phrase “dead souls” had such an ominously ambiguous ring about it that people began suspecting whether there might not be lurking therein some hint as to certain bodies that had had to be hurriedly buried in consequence of two events that had happened not so long before.115 Both parties, the men as much as the women, notably lack the first and last of the four hermeneutic steps, the alpha and omega of interpretation: they fail to grasp either the literal or the anagogical sense of Chichikov’s souls. Rumor, G ­ ogol ­implies, devoid of either assignable starting point or end, necessarily lands in the abyss.

d)  Fama as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Fama is an untrustworthy guide to truth, leading in circles both the men and women of the town of N– in their attempt to piece together the puzzle of ­Chichikov’s souls. This becomes particularly clear when one compares the ­origins of rumor at the beginning of Chapter Eight with its provisional closure at the end of Chapter Nine. Driven by their already mentioned “perpetual apprehension,” the town fathers initially feared nothing more concrete than that “an ­actual uprising [might] occur among such unruly folk as Chichikov’s peasants,”116

115 “мертвые души …, чорт его знает, что значат, но в них заключено, однако ж, весьма скверное, нехорошее” (VI, 192); “Все вдруг отыскали в себе такие грехи, каких даже не было. Слово мертвые души так раздалось неопределенно, что стали подозревать даже, нет ли здесь какого намека на скоропостижно погребенные тела, вследствие двух не так давно случившихся событий” (VI, 193). See also VI, 194, where the juridical aspect of the officials’ considerations comes through: “[T]hey began to think it must have to do with the matter of those dead souls” (“стали думать, что верно, об этих мертвых душах идет теперь дело”; emphasis U.H.). That their dualistic male logic derives from a bad conscience is evident when the officials ask themselves if Chichikov is “the kind of man who should be apprehended … or the kind of man who could apprehend … all of them” (“[Есть‑ли Чичиков] такой … человек, которого нужно задержать и схватить как неблагонамеренного, или … такой человек, который может сам схватить и задержать их всех как неблагонамеренных”; VI, 196). In the heavenly court the answer would naturally be “both.” 116 “чтобы не произошло даже бунта между таким беспокойним народом, каковы крестьяне Чичикова” (VI, 155).

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against which eventuality they provided copious advice. Chichikov, for his part, assured them that an uprising among his serfs was quite out of the question; they were, in fact, the most placid population conceivable—they were dead. 117 But this provided no respite; Gogol does not for a moment allow such a thought to arise. On the contrary, the motif of revolt fills the entire second half of Chapter Nine. The town, we learn, “was positively riotous,” a statement on which the narrator colorfully expands: “the whole jolly mess stirred and rose. The whole town, which up to now seemed to be dozing, swirled up like a whirlwind.”118 All that was hidden came to light, awoken, as it were, from the sleep of death—the eschatological associations are purposeful. And responsible for all of this was rumor, set in train by the two agreeable ladies, who leave their tête-à-tête solely “to incite the town to riot.” Nor do they believe in half measures: “This enterprise,” we are told, “they contrived to carry out in just a trifle over half an hour.”119 Scattered through Gogol’s text are numerous references to revolt and uprising. Taken together, they provide a picture of rumor—which at least since the French revolution has been a close associate of rebellion—as not only bringing news of uprising but as inflaming and organizing it. Rumor is the creative face of collective anxiety, conjuring up the very object it fears. As a self-fulfilling prophecy it evinces a cyclical structure whose contours can be traced in Gogol’s leitmotifs.

4.  The Defense of the Lie by the Lie as Art a)  The Twelfth Chapter of Dead Souls “The citizens of this town had, even without this, as we have already seen in the first chapter, come to love Chichikov with all their hearts, and now, after such rumors, they came to love him with their hearts and souls both”—thus we read at the beginning of Chapter Eight.120 By the end of Chapter Nine this love had turned to fear. The one question still troubling the town fathers was whether Chichikov was “the kind of man who should be apprehended and detained as a

117 “Чичиков благодарил, говоря …, что бунта ни в каком случае между ними быть не может” (VI, 156). 118 “Город был решительно взбунтован” (VI, 189); “всё, что ни есть, поднялось. Как вихорь взметнулся дотоле, казалось, дремавший город!” (VI, 190). 119 “обе дамы и отправились каждая в свою сторону бунтовать город. Это предприятие удалось произвести им с небольшим в полчаса” (VI, 189). 120 “Жители города и без того, как уже мы видели в первой главе, душевно полюбили Чичикова, а теперь, после таких слухов, полюбили еще душевнее” (VI, 156).

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suspicious person, or the kind of man who could himself apprehend and detain all of them as suspicious persons.”121 They wonder if he might not perhaps be a covert agent of the new Governor-General, and this time it is public opinion rather than the narrator that ascribes the role of Inspector to him.122 Whether as spy or outlaw, Chichikov has now irrevocably lost his standing in the town; and for a man who knows, as no other, “the great secret of making oneself liked,”123 the plunge from public darling to object of hatred marks a decisive turning point. If we consider the court scene in Chapter Seven as the first act in Chichikov’s public appearance in the town of N– and the ball in Chapter Eight as the second, then Chapter Nine, the third act of the drama, would contain the ­peripeteia—in a classical five-act play the ideal location for such a turning point. Should, then, Chapters Ten and Eleven be taken to constitute acts four and five of that drama? Given the content of these two chapters, such an equation seems too simple, for while the first nine units of Gogol’s novel each treat a single theme, this no longer holds for the last two: Chapter Ten contains the surmises of the town officials about Chichikov’s criminal career, including “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin,” his public exclusion, and finally his resolution to take flight; Chapter Eleven then depicts this flight, into which it inserts Chichikov’s prehistory. If one orders these two chapters according to their dominant motifs, they present a triad: Chichikov as criminal genius, as refugee, and as growing man. But Dead Souls has eleven chapters, not twelve: for Gogol the number eleven—as the number denoting sin in Christian symbolism and the root number around which Dante’s Divina Commedia revolves124—was of the utmost importance for the architecture of his Inferno. Yet in the middle of his tenth chapter, the author set the erratic block of the tale of the invalid Kopeikin, that strange veteran of the Napoleonic wars whose raison d’être was manifestly as impenetrable to the censors as it was to the critics. Gogol himself, we know from his letters, considered it one of the work’s key passages and was absolutely unwilling to forego it.125 In fact its typographic, as well as stylistic, separation from the rest of the novel, along with its purpose-built framework, give “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” the virtual status of a chapter in its own

121 122 123 124

For the Russian original see note 115. See VI, 193. “Чичиков …, знавший в самом деле великую тайну нравиться” (VI, 157). See Rolf-Dietrich Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985), 133. 125 See Iurii M. Lotman, “Povest′ o kapitane Kopeikine (rekonstruktsiia zamysla i ideino– kompozitsionnaia funktsiia),” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 11 (1979): 28.

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right—a hypothesis we can test by the simple experiment of asking what light it sheds on the structure of Gogol’s novel.

b)  “Neither Hand nor Foot”: Captain Kopeikin Captain Kopeokin, whose story is told by Postmaster Ivan Andreich—the man with the remarkable soubriquet Shprekhen zi deich (Sprechen Sie Deutsch? = “Do you speak German?,” VI, 156)—has in a certain sense been doubly mutilated, first losing a hand and a foot for his country and then losing substantial parts of his tale to the censors, who initially wanted to delete him altogether from Gogol’s manuscript.126 An injured war veteran refused even a minimum pension by the czarist authorities posed something of a threat as a popular hero and brigand leader. It has never been easy to understand why Gogol found him so important. Without Kopeikin, he wrote to Pletnev, his poem would “have a hole in it that I could not mend or fill with anything else.”127 Researchers have shed much light on this tale-within-a-tale, especially with regard to its folkloric, historical, and literary roots, from Cervantes and Lesage to Pushkin,128 yet little has been found that might explain why it was structurally so indispensable to its author. The weft of motifs linking the Kopeikin episode with the main text proves a more promising hunting ground in this respect, for the robber Captain and Chichikov have more in common than the personal identity predicated upon them by the Postmaster.129 The very name Kopeikin reflects the Chichikovian motto “take care of each kopeck”; conversely, the 126 See commentary on VI, 890. Guerney translates that Kopeikin had “an arm and a leg blown off ”, but due to the ambiguity of Russian semantics, his disability could as well be confined to the loss of a hand and a foot, as ruka and noga mean both: arm/hand and leg/foot. 127 “прореха, которой я ничем не в силах заплатать и зашить” (cited in Lotman, “Povest′ o kapitane Kopeikine,” 28). 128 For folklore background see V. A. Voropaev, “Zametki o fol′klornom istochnike gogolevskoi “Povesti o kapitane Kopeikine,” Filologicheskie nauki 6 (1982): 35–41; for historical background see idem, “Michman Kropotov i kapitan Kopeikin,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 9 (1988): 61–63. Lotman, “Povest′ o kapitane Kopeikine” comments on the importance of Pushkin for the origins of the story. E. V. Grekova, “Dva etiuda o Gogole,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 53, no. 1 (1994): 36–41; and Adam Weiner, By Authors Possessed. The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 77–92, read it as a reply to Lesage; Bruce T. Holl, “Gogol’s Captain Kopeikin and Cervantes’ Captive Captain: A Case of Metaparody,” The Russian Review 55 (1996): 681–691, as a metaparody of Cervantes. 129 The following aspects take up and further develop points made by Woodward, Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” 220; Lotman, “Povest′ o kapitane Kopeikine,” 41f.; and Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 83.

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General-in-Chief ’s advice to Kopeikin, “Gird yourself with patience,” expresses Chichikov’s most striking virtue.130 Further parallels are their rank (a Captain was the military equivalent of a civilian Collegiate Councilor),131 their unbending fathers,132 their rebuff by a grandee’s doorman (this still awaits Chichikov), and, as a central point, their association with the Romantic figure of an unjustly treated robber—the comparison of Chichikov with Rinaldo Rinaldini in the account of the agreeable lady corresponds with the typology of Kleist’s eponymous character Michael Kohlhaas in the Kopeikin story. Such an accumulation of parallels bespeaks not chance but method. What, then, can the Postmaster’s “poem” tell us about the central character of Gogol’s poema?133 The obvious intention of “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” is to exculpate Chichikov. The Postmaster has from the start shown considerable sympathy for him: already at the beginning of Chapter Eight he draws a picture of the traveling conman becoming “a father … to his peasants,”134 and if to this were added the qualities of a Robin Hood, who would then want to condemn him morally? In this light the question becomes more urgent: What have Chichikov and Captain Kopeikin in common? Gogol’s answer is clear and uncompromising: Nothing! That is the tantalizing thing about the Kopeikin figure. The suspicion that he might be Chichikov (or a Chichikov) has been nourished with numerous parallels but at the same time definitively refuted from its very inception: the second sentence of the story tells us that Kopeikin lost a hand and a foot in the 1812 campaign—a difference to the robustly healthy Chichikov that the fictive audience—amazingly enough—only grasps five pages later. Gogol has already hinted to his readers that the Postmaster’s tale has—to use a German idiom—neither hand nor foot: in other words, it makes no sense, it is fatally crippled. And although Russian (like English) has no equivalent to this expression, it might just be that the Postmaster has heard it. Why else should the whole town call him by the nickname Shprekhen zi deich Ivan Andreich?

130 “Вооружитесь терпением” (VI, 203). 131 This should be taken cum grano salis. In the table of ranks established by Peter the Great, an army captain (Kopeikin) would be the equivalent of a civilian collegiate assessor. As a collegiate councilor, Chichikov would have been of equal rank with an army colonel or a naval captain (first class). But as captains in both the Russian army and navy were called kapitan and the navy had no equivalent rank to the army captain (see table in Keil, Nikolai W. Gogol, 132), the association of Chichikov with a kapitan does not seem overly forced. 132 Compare VI, 200 with 225. 133 VI, 199 refers to the Kopeikin story as a poema. The following subsection has more to say about this. 134 See VI, 156.

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c)  The Poet’s “Monkey” The sense of the Kopeikin episode would seem, then, to lie in the person of its narrator; in which case it may well be useful to look at him a little more closely. This “wit” with a penchant for “satirical innuendoes” spends his nights copying lengthy excerpts from Young’s Night Thoughts and Eckhartshausen’s The Key to the Mysteries of Nature.135 He announces his story as “a whole epic [poema], in a sort of a way”—a genre ascription that the narrator expressly repeats.136 But who better than Gogol himself at this moment fits the bill of a Romantic satirist declaiming a prose poem? As his own author’s alter ego, the Postmaster is, ­however—above all in his Romantic guise—a caricature rather than a selfportrait; and his desperate attempt to salvage his hypothesis of Chichikov as a seriously maimed robber-captain by means of an (unashamedly borrowed) Hoffmannesque automaton makes him even more ludicrous: [A] minute later he was already trying … to squirm out of the situation, saying that after all, mechanical ingenuity had reached a very high point of perfection in England, that … someone had invented wooden legs so ingeniously made that at the mere touch of an imperceptible spring they would carry a man off to God knows what regions. …137 When, after an obbligato pinch of snuff, the Postmaster begins “dear sir”—­despite the fact that “the room held not one sir but all of six sirs”—he demonstrates the extent to which the gestures associated with Romantic frame narratives have lost all inherent purpose.138 And when he “garnishe[s] his speech … through a 135 VI, 157 refers to the Postmaster as ostriak, speaks of his “satirichesk[ie] namek[i],” and refers to Young and Eckhartshausen. 136 “‘Капитан Копейкин …, это …, в некотором роде, целая поэма’. Все присутствую­щие изъявили желание узнать эту […], в некотором роде, целую поэму” (VI, 199). 137 “что, впрочем, в Англии очень усовершенствована механика, что … один изобрел деревянные ноги таким образом, что при одном прикосновении к незаметной пружинке уносили эти ноги человека бог знает в какие места” (VI, 205). For Gogol’s Hoffmann reception see, for example, Michail Gorlin, N.V. Gogol und E.Th.A. Hoffmann (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1933); Charles E. Passage, The Russian Hoffmannists (The Hague: Mouton, 1963); Norman W. Ingham, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Reception in Russia (Würzburg: Jal, 1974); Gudrun Langer, “Gogol’s dumme Philosophen. Der Dialog mit der philosophischen Ästhetik in ‘Vij’ und ‘Zapiski sumasšedšego,’” Die Welt der Slaven 41 (1996): 1–27. 138 “‘После кампании двенадцатого года, судырь ты мой’,—так начал почтмейстер, несмотря на то что в комнате сидел не один сударь, а целых шестеро” (VI, 199). The Postmaster considers tobacco—classically a drug attributed to the devil—as the acme of

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multiplicity of sundry tag-ends and oddments of phrases such as … ‘some sort of a fellow,’ ‘you know,’ ‘you understand,’ ‘you can just imagine,’ […] relatively speaking, so to say,’ ‘in a sort of a way,’ and other such verbal small change,” then this is strongly reminiscent of one of the best-known literary fi­ gures of Russian Romanticism, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, the central character of Gogol’s novella The Overcoat. Akaky speaks “to a great extent in prepositions, adverbs, and ultimately in particles that have no meaning at all.”139 The resemblance is all the stronger as Bashmachkin and Captain Kopeikin share the same fate. Having lost his one warm garment and been turned scathingly away by the authorities, Akaky—until then a faithful civil servant—metamorphoses into an avenging, coat-robbing ghost. In the figure of the Postmaster, one might say, Akaky celebrates his resurrection as a Romantic story-teller. If one asks why Gogol should create the teller of the Kopeikin story so much in his own image and at the same time make such a mockery of him, then the most probable answer would seem to be that he sought a prominent counterposition to his own stance as narrator. The “Poem of the Good ­Captain Kopeck” is the anti-poem to the true story of the kopeck-­worshipping ­Chichikov—the Romantic kitsch variant of Dead Souls. The Postmaster is one of those “happy … writer[s]” who can “pass … by characters that are tedious repulsive, overwhelming in their sad actuality,” whereas the narrator of Dead Souls counts himself among the unfortunates who are bound by truth to “bring out … all that fearsome, overwhelming, slimy morass of minutiae” that we know as reality.140 However, the Postmaster’s claim to the role of poet becomes positively obtrusive when it involves, in his own words, recovering the truth in its primordial guise of aletheia—here in the form of the “rumors about Captain Kopeikin”— from the “river of oblivion, … some Lethe or other, as the poets call it.”141 This p­ urity: “табак—вещь, требующая чистоты (VI, 199).” On the attribution to the devil see the entry in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns Bächthold–Stäubli (­Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1987), vol. 8, col. 627–629. 139 Compare the Postmaster’s rhetoric: “уснащивал он речь множеством разных частиц, как то: ‘судырь ты мой, эдакой какой‑нибудь, знаете, понимаете, можете себе представить, относительно, так сказать, некоторым образом’, и прочими, которые сыпал он мешками” (VI, 157) with that of Akaky: “Нужно знать, что Акакий Акакиевич изъяснялся большею частью предлогами, наречиями, и, наконец, такими частицами, которые решительно не имеют никакого значения” (III, 149). Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 82–83, draws a different comparison between the Kopeikin episode and The Overcoat. 140 “Счастлив писатель, который мимо характеров скучных, противных, поражающих печальною своей действительностью, приближается к характерам, являющим высокое достоинство человека” (VI, 133). For the second text (VI, 134) see note 17. 141 “Так, понимаете, и слухи о капитане Копейкине канули в реку забвения, в какую‑нибудь эдакую Лету, как называют поэты” (VI, 205).

Judgment and Rumor

amounts to a full-scale imitation of the pose of his own creator, with all its moralizing gestures. But there is another aspect of this claim, for the Postmaster reveals himself to be an agent of Fama: the truth he would broadcast is, after all, that of “rumors.”142 He is, then, the “monkey” of the poet of Dead Souls. His whole artistic guise, borrowed from his maker, serves a double purpose: the dissemination of rumor and the moral justification of the lying genius Chichikov. The pseudo-poem of Captain Kopeikin is, then, an exemplary defense of the lie by the lie as art, its narrator a poetic advocatus diaboli. In the long run he can do little to stem the course of his master’s tale, but he can and does retard its immediate impact.

d)  To the Devil with Truth! The pseudo-poet’s story fails to convince his audience—Captain Kopeikin’s missing hand and foot (both literal and figurative) were simply too obvious— and after a final skirmish he left the field, defeated. The company was of the opinion that “the Postmaster had strayed much too far afield,”143 which did not prevent them, however, from straying still farther. They wonder if Chichikov might not be Napoleon in disguise,144 and behind Napoleon, the Antichrist. Here, for the first (and only) time they touch on the possibility of an anagogical interpretation of Chichikov and his dealings, but in doing so distance themselves ever more ridiculously from the truth. Nevertheless, their fantasies grant the narrator the opportunity to present himself as a pillar of honesty: “Perhaps there are some readers who will call all this improbable; the author, too, just for the sake of pleasing them, is ready to call all this improbable; but, as ill luck would have it, everything took place precisely as it is told here.”145 According to Aristotle it is, in opposition to the task of the historian, “not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ [… in] that 142 And probably for the same reason he is only presented as an oral narrator: “The voice of pheme keeps its distance from the universe of the written word” (Neubauer, Fama, 41). 143 “Но все … нашли, что почтмейстер хватил уже слишком далеко” (VI, 205). 144 Russell Scott Valentino offers quite an intruiging argument that Chichikov, as an agent of social and economical change, indeed may be seen as “a Napoleon in disguise” (Russell Scott Valentino, “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 [1998]: 562). 145 “Может быть, некоторые читатели назовут всё это невероятным, автор тоже в угоду им готов вы назвать всё это невероятным; но как на беду всё именно произошло так, как рассказывается” (VI, 206).

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one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.”146 In this respect ­Gogol’s narrator, in reaction to his deliriously meandering Postmaster-colleague, has changed sides to become an advocate of historiography against poetry—of truth against mere probability. The town’s bureaucrats, however, resolve to get to the bottom of the matter and, in pursuit of that resolution, to fish in the murkiest of waters, namely N ­ ozdrev, who “had been the first to put out the story about the dead souls.” The narrator finds reason to reflect: “Strange people, these Messieurs the bureaucrats. … For they knew very well that Nozdrev was a liar, … and yet, just the same, they had recourse to him.”147 But Nozdrev was not just a liar—on the allegorical level of Dead Souls he was the Father of Lies. Only once had he told the truth, when he trumpeted out Chichikov’s dealing in dead souls. When the town fathers seek him out in this matter, it means both literally and figuratively that they consign truth to the devil. And the devil, in accordance with his office, completes their confusion. What he tells the assembled officials not only—as we have already noted—bears no resemblance to the truth: it bears no resemblance to anything at all, and as such represents the quintessential inadaequatio rei et intellectus.148 The only conclusion the elders can come to is that “The Devil alone knows what all this is!”149—a testimony to their helplessness, but at the same time a subconscious admission that they know Nozdrev’s real status. Beginning and ending the cycle of rumor with the devil, Gogol’s construct is unambiguously theological, a point he drives home with his commentary on the town fathers’ decision to consult the devil in the person of that landowner. Comparing them with men who “do … not believe in God” but dwell fearfully on arcane signs, who “will pass over the creation of a poet” and “eagerly pounce upon … a lot of nonsense” woven by “some daring fellow,”150 he finally condemns their speculations as betrayal of the “eternal truth” in its emphatically Christian interpretation as istina: “But come, now, all this is absurd! This is utterly preposterous. It’s impossible that these officials should frighten themselves so, should create such a bother over a rigmarole like that, should go so far astray 146 Aristotle, Poetics, sec. 1, part 9, trans. P. H. Butcher (emphasis U.H.). 147 “Так как он первый вынес историю о мертвых душах …, то попробовать еще, что скажет Ноздрев. Странные люди эти господа чиновники …: ведь очень хорошо знали, что Ноздрев лгун …, а между тем именно прибегнули к нему” (VI, 207). 148 VI, 209; for Russian text see p. 146. 149 “Чорт знает, что такое!” (VI, 209). 150 “Поди ты, сладь с человеком! не верит в бога, а верит, что если почешется переносье, то непременно умрет; пропустит мимо создание поэта, ясное, как день …, а бросится именно на то, где какой‑нибудь удалец напутает, наплетет, изломает, выворотит природу” (VI, 207).

Judgment and Rumor

from the truth [istina] when even the veriest babe can see what the whole business is about!”151 “This is utterly preposterous [eto nesoglasno ni s chem]”—unlike anything at all. Again the adaequatio formula echoes distantly, telling us that rumor ends in a dissonance between word and thing similar to that so far seen only in the person of Nozdrev, its prime propagator. At the end of the Postmaster episode, Gogol again vigorously advertises his authorial scale of values: poetry and truth belong to the celestial sphere, rumor and would-be art, as forms of the lie, to the diabolical. But there is another, highly significant nuance to Gogol’s understanding of Fama—that at the end of the day the devil need no longer teach his adepts anything. We have just seen them publicly invoking him, and he in return giving them carte blanche—his final blessing, so to speak—confirming any and every conjecture they set unbidden before him. The edifice of lies, the work of rumor, which breaks upon Gogol’s character, is a human construct through and through. The devil need do no more than throw the cooks in that kitchen a morsel of truth—the rest they will merrily brew up on their own.

5.  The Banishing of the Lie by the Lie Autonomous a)  The Knot Untied “Chichikov was utterly unaware of what was going on”152—this brief statement ends the report of the irresistibly swelling rumors about him. He had been absent from the stage—a mere object of rumor rather than a subject of action— since the tying of the knot of his fate at the end of Chapter Eight. The excuse invented to cover this circumstance—a three-day indisposition with no less than three symptoms: “a slight cold,” “a gumboil,” and “a slight inflammation of the throat”—is of such schoolboy clumsiness that it is obviously meant to alert our suspicions and ensure Chichikov’s absence does not pass unnoticed.153 This

151 “‘Но это, однако ж, несообразно! это несогласно ни с чем! это невозможно, чтобы чиновники так могли сами напугать себя, создать такой вздор, так отдалиться от истины, когда даже ребенку видно, в чем дело!’ Так скажут многие читатели” (VI, 210; emphasis U.H.). See Jn 14:6: “Исус сказал …: Я есть путь и истина и жизнь.” 152 “Чичиков ничего обо всем этом не знал совершенно” (VI, 211). 153 “Как нарочно, в то время он получил легкую простуду, флюс и небольшое воспаление в горле” (VI, 211). Note especially the introductory kak narochno, which Guerney translates: “As ill luck would have it,” although “As if on purpose” would seem more appropriate.

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is again strongly reminiscent of The Government Inspector, whose central figure leaves the stage for two whole acts and is yet on everyone’s lips. In the case of Chlestakov this occurs in the first and last act of the play; with Chichikov—if we allow the dramatic analogy—it does so in Acts III and IV: the point in classical drama where the complication peaks and is then temporarily suspended before moving on to its resolution in the final act. Typically theatrical here is the difference in knowledge consequent on Chichikov’s absence: the leading citizens fostering the intrigue and debating the rumor (and we with them) know more at this stage than does their victim—a gap in awareness that is a (if not the) prime instrument of dramatic tension. Characteristic of act four of a classical tragedy is, then, a standstill (a so-called catastasis) induced at the climax of the action by an incursion of events that retards, but is ab initio incapable of averting, the catastrophe and thus enhances the dramatic irony. The Kopeikin episode, along with its framing narrative, fulfills this function perfectly, as it elevates Chichikov both morally (as an unjustly treated robber Captain) and socially (as a refugee French Emperor—and in that respect like the town captain in The Government Inspector, who appears as a virtual general), and hence increases the height from which he falls, without contributing anything to the progress of the intrigue against him. Immediately afterward comes the catastasis: the initiators of the rumor that has raised Chichikov up and will bring him down are at a loss—a paralysis interrupted by an event that can actually only bring good fortune to Chichikov: in the midst of the wildfire rumors the Public Prosecutor dies. Chichikov, one might conclude, has nothing more to fear. And he does in fact return to the stage; but that return is full of dramatic irony. Restored to health, he is in high festive mood; even the little blonde with whose advent at the feast his catastrophe began, returns to his mind154—an erotic vision that forges symmetry between Chichikov’s disappearance and his reappearance. The symmetry applies equally to Nozdrev, who left the stage almost at the same time as Chichikov and now returns with him, summoned to town by the officials from a four-day self imposed isolation dedicated to the manufacture of a perfectly marked deck of cards. Nozdrev is questioned about Chichikov that same evening.155 Chichikov, for his part, sets out on his round of visits to those

154 “Выход его, как всякого выздоровевшего человека, был точно праздничный” (VI, 212; emphasis U.H.). 155 “Так и господа наши ухватились наконец и за Ноздрева. Полицеймейстер в ту же минуту написал к нему записочку пожаловать на вечер. … Ноздрев был занят важным делом; целые четыре дня уже не выходил он из комнаты” (VI, 207).

Judgment and Rumor

same officials (the town fathers) straight after his recovery from illness, on the morning of that fourth day.156 To his consternation, he is everywhere turned away and returns to his room at dusk only to be surprised by Nozdrev, who knocks on his door as he is pouring tea and proceeds to enlighten him about his predicament. In other words, Nozdrev and Chichikov, the initiator of the intrigue and his victim, enter town simultaneously, and simultaneously learn the outcome of the intrigue and its rumor. The dramatic accentuation inherent in such a coincidence is veiled only by the fact that Gogol, bound by the laws of prose, can only narrate successively what in the reality of his fiction occurs contemporaneously. The action following the Kopeikin episode is, then, compressed into a brief period featuring in mirror image the exact pattern of figures responsible for tying the knot around Chichikov in the first place. Fama, the driving force in the process, has played herself out; Chichikov’s soul-purchasing story has run its course and its propagators have talked themselves into silence. Isolated from the ongoing narrative and viewed purely in terms of its dramatic function, this moment reveals itself as the cardinal point of the action—the moment in classical drama, answering to the tying of the tragic knot, when catastasis moves to catastrophe. In the analogy of the five-act play, it marks the border between the fourth and fifth acts.157 And, in fact, the action now proceeds rapidly to its conclusion. Nozdrev enlightens Chichikov as to the reasons for his rebuff at so many doors—that the townsfolk consider him a forger, robber, spy, and would-be abductor of a marriageable girl. In his account, Nozdrev stays—as he did in launching the intrigue—remarkably close to the facts. Here, too, Gogol maintains an exact symmetry. Only one element is missing from Nozdrev’s account: Chichikov’s dealing in souls. In the fog of speculation about his possible misdeeds, his actual crime—although initially proclaimed by none other than Nozdrev—has been erased from consciousness. While Chichikov’s tragic error consisted in persuading himself “that a foolish word didn’t mean a thing,” he now faces a searing anagnorisis: he learns the hard way what the word on Fama’s lips can achieve, spinning a single thread of truth into a web of lies from which only flight can save him. That flight in act five resolves the dramatic knot. Chapter Eleven adds nothing essential to the action. Neither the delay to Chichikov’s departure nor the encounter with the Public Prosecutor’s funeral procession—to which 156 Gogol explicitly emphasizes that such visits are made in the morning (see VI, 178). 157 See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Munich: Max Hueber, 1973), §1197.

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Nozdrev expressly invited him in Chapter Ten—alter Chichikov’s position. Without more ado he leaves the town of N–, and with it the theater of public talk and activity that he had entered four acts previously.

b)  Chichikov’s First Corpse: The Public Prosecutor Chichikov’s flight is interrupted by the funeral procession of the Public Prosecutor. The encounter is highly symbolic, inasmuch as this is the only real corpse in the book. Gogol evidently wants to subject his character to the reality of death as a final test before he leaves the Inferno. Like the peasants whose lists he perused in Chapter Seven—the first act of the drama—the Public Prosecutor “had been alive only yesterday.”158 His death is unhesitatingly ascribed to “[a]ll these bits of talk, all these opinions and rumors” about Chichikov and his dealing in dead souls.159 The Public Prosecutor is certainly an ambiguous figure. For Sobakevich he is the “one … decent man” in the town, and nevertheless “a swine.” Nozdrev is his constant companion, and Chichikov borrows his carriage to take him home from the local court.160 That the man with the “left eye always winking” actually had a soul only dawns on the townspeople when he lies lifeless before them; in life he had, as the narrator mordantly observes, “out of modesty … never flaunted it.”161 Yet the chronicler makes it equally clear that it is not for the living to pass judgment on the dead. Now the Prosecutor is “laid out on a table, that eye not winking at all, yet with one of his eyebrows still elevated with a certain questioning air. What the late lamented was asking about, why he had died or why he had lived, that God alone knows.”162 Not by chance, this question is followed by the (already mentioned) excursus on the concept of eternal truth (vechnaia istina) rooted in the words of Christ,

158 VI, 136; for the Russian text see note 32. 159 “Все эти толки, мнения и слухи неизвестно по какой причине больше всего подействовали на бедного прокурора” (VI, 209). 160 For Sobakevich’s comment see VI, 97. Nozdrev appears in the company of the Public ­Prosecutor in Chapter One (VI, 17), at the ball (VI, 171), and—inviting Chichikov to the funeral—in Chapter Ten (VI, 214). For Chichikov see VI, 152. 161 “увидели, что прокурор был уже одно бездушное тело. Тогда только с соболезнованием узнали, что у покойника была, точно, душа, хотя он по скромности своей никогда ее не показывал” (VI, 210). 162 “[Т]еперь лежал на столе, левый глаз уже не мигал вовсе, но бровь одна всё еще была приподнята с каким‑то вопросительным выражением. О чем покойник спрашивал, зачем он умер, или зачем жил, об этом один бог ведает” (VI, 210; emphasis U.H.).

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for the issue here is the sense and value of the human soul as such, and that is a question only God—and Chichikov!—can answer. The latter (as we also saw earlier) indulges in a plenitude of mocking remarks about the condolences that will fill the newspapers, before going on his way, happy because “they say meeting a dead man is an omen of good luck.”163 From the safety of his carriage Chichikov precisely analyzes the suppressive function of the euphemisms that so often accompany death: their “constant quieting of death,” their care that “even the event of death should not disturb or disquiet the public in their worrying lack of care” (Heidegger).164 The cynic sees immediately through the cynicism of the mourners, all of whose thoughts “were concentrated on themselves” rather than on the deceased, even if, on this occasion, that more serious focus kept them from “workaday small talk.”165 Thus far does Chichikov’s wisdom reach, but not a jot further.166 Behind his acute observations on death’s earthly accompaniments lies blindness to any ulterior meaning death might possess. His perspective betrays its lack of depth in a single detail: the Prosecutor’s eyebrows. Where the narrator sees precisely this feature as articulating in death the question governing human existence—a question whose answer “God alone knows”—Chichikov has his answer pat to hand: “There, the Public Prosecutor lived on and on, and then he up and died! … [A]nd yet, if one were to go into this matter rather thoroughly, … it would turn out that all there really was to you was your bushy eyebrows.” 167 Flagrantly contradicting his claim to thoroughness, Chichikov, reduces life to a grotesque facial feature. With such an attitude, his ostensibly absurd fear that he might be held responsible for the Prosecutor’s death168 would seem—before God—all too justified. While the townspeople at least posthumously grant the one real victim of their rumors a soul, Chichikov implicitly denies him even this ultimate human attribute.169 163 See p. 160. 164 Being and Time, §51. See Gerigk, “Nikolaj Gogol,” 102. 165 Of the men, the text reads: “Все мысли их были сосредоточены в это время в самих себе”; of the women: “они были заняты живым разговором” (VI, 219). 166 The repetition of Chichikov’s own phrase about “widows and orphans” (see VI, 36–37, cited on p. 124) draws attention to the hypocrisy of Chichikov’s perception of the clichés of public mourning. 167 “Вот, прокурор! жил, жил, а потом и умер! … [А] ведь если разобрать хорошенько дело, так … у тебя всего только и было, что густые брови” (VI, 219–220). 168 “смерть прокурора, которой причиною будто бы он” (VI, 215). 169 Adam Weiner takes a contrary line, seeing Chichikov’s reaction to the death of the Public Prosecutor as indicating a rapprochement between the character and the narrator: “By intimating the absurdity and tragedy of soulless living, Chichikov seems to offer hope for future spiritual growth” (Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 68). But Weiner speaks of Chichikov’s

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Figure 14. W heel of fortune chained to an iron block so that the horns of plenty fixed to the wheel rim cannot pour out their gifts Fate stands in the way W hat shall I do? Invidious Fate hinders the noble deed So that I am unable to continue on my course.

c)  Beyond the Competence of the Worldly Court Worried lest he be recognized, the fugitive dares only to peep through the “little glass panes in the leather curtains” of his carriage. But his apprehension is in vain: the mourners are far too preoccupied with their own fears at the impending arrival of the new Governor-General. The scene is comically reminiscent of The Government Inspector, where the stranger and the locals are each paralyzed with fear of the other. Chichikov’s nervousness is all the more absurd when one reflects who exactly is being buried. That Gogol chooses to have Chichikov “failure to abstract the prosecutor’s exclusively corporeal life to a universal principle” as if Chichikov’s cardinal error was not precisely to reduce any stirring of the human spirit to pure materiality.

Judgment and Rumor

stopped in his flight by the corpse of the town’s Chief Prosecutor presents in the form of a tableau what was already apparent enough in the court scene of ­Chapter Seven: that Chichikov had nothing to fear from the judgment of the worldly court. That he should perceive this particular funeral procession as threatening shows the extent of his delusion. But there is another side to Chichikov’s blindness, the real danger is from elsewhere, and this Gogol is equally intent on showing. The funeral procession is only the second obstacle to Chichikov’s flight: first his carriage must be made fit for the road, and that proves a lengthy business. When the blacksmiths—since antiquity in league with the devil170—surmise that he is in a hurry, they demand six times their normal price, and take almost three times the normal time. The narrator comments: “No matter how heated he became, calling them swindlers, robbers, highwaymen, even hinting at what would happen to them on dread Judgment Day, he didn’t penetrate their hides at all.”171 The fugitive on the verge of departure with almost four hundred souls in his bag threatens the devil’s allies with the Last Judgment and shortly afterward pales in fear at the approach of a dead man—Gogol could scarcely have demonstrated more succinctly how profoundly Chichikov mistakes the true shape of things. The reference to the Last Judgment picks up the motif of eternal retribution from the opening of the drama. Another circle closes.

d)  Closing Circles Chichikov’s flight is interrupted a third time by the narrator’s review of his life, which finally solves the riddle of the dead souls. This intermezzo no longer impinges on the traveler’s conscious mind, for he has gone to sleep. In a subtle variant of a popular Romantic motif Gogol reveals a deeper psychological truth about his character: Finally the road as well ceased to entertain him; his eyes began to close a little and his head to incline toward the cushion. The author confesses that he is actually very glad of this, since it will afford him an opportunity of saying something about his hero, inasmuch as up to now, as the reader has seen, the author has

170 On the diabolical aspect of the blacksmith’s art see note 100 on p. 141. 171 “Как он ни горячился, называл их мошенниками, разбойниками, грабителями проезжающих, намекнул даже на страшный суд, но кузнецов ничем не пронял” (VI, 217).

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been incessantly hindered now by Nozdrev, now by balls, then by ladies, then by the tittle-tattle of the town, then, finally, by thousands of those trifles which seem trifles only when they are put into a book but which, while they are in circulation in the world, are held to be quite important matters. But now let us put absolutely everything to one side and get right down to business.172 As he brings the second half of Dead Souls—the half dedicated to rumor—to its end, Gogol is again concerned to express the relation of the poet to Fama. Emphatically he asserts the distance separating “the voice of pheme” from “the universe of the written word”173 and in the same breath casts a great arc from the last act of his drama to the first. For “those trifles which seem trifles only when they are put into a book” unmistakably recall the digression at the beginning of Chapter Seven where the narrator laments his personal fate as one bound to bring before men’s eyes “all that … slimy morass of minutiae that have bogged down our life.” That both passages are preceded by the description of a journey makes the cyclical structure so much the clearer.

172 “Наконец и дорога перестала занимать его, и он стал слегка закрывать глаза и склонять голову к подушке. Автор признается, этому даже рад, находя таким образом случай поговорить о своем герое; ибо доселе, как читатель видел, ему беспрестанно мешали то Ноздрев, то балы, то дамы, то городские сплетни, то, наконец, тысячи тех мелочей, которые кажутся только тогда мелочами, когда внесены в книгу, а покаместь обращаются в свете, почитаются за весьма важные дела. Но теперь отложим совершенно всё в сторону и прямо займемся делом” (VI, 222–223). 173 Neubauer, Fama, 41. Relevant in this context is the “tension” that existed in Russia since the schism of the seventeenth century “between belief in the power of the ‘true’ word … and concomitant mistrust of the official [and hence, too, public U.H.] word” (Schamma Schahadat, “Rußland: Reich der falschen Zeichen. Die Lüge, das Wort und die Macht bei Gogol’, Suchovo Kobylin, Erdman und Mejerchol’d,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 44 [1997]: 98).

CHAPTER 8

The Five Acts of the Drama

Viewed as a whole, in its most significant features, the life of every individual is a tragedy; but examined in detail it has the character of a comedy. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Image1

Chichikov’s flight from the town ends his—in every sense of the word—­ dramatic career as a public figure, a lesson in five acts whose outline it will be useful once again to briefly summarize. With its undeniably expository elements, Chapter Seven can justifiably be seen as the first act of a drama. Surveying his purchase lists, Chichikov provides a review of events to date. Then, at the local court, he meets Manilov and Sobakevich, the two landowners whom he intended to do business with in the first place—another implicitly expository feature. Two of the three driving forces of the dramatic process are also introduced at this stage: on the one hand Chichikov’s fear that his scam might become public, on the other the attraction he exercised on the ladies of the town. These motives can be gendered as masculine and feminine respectively, the latter for obvious reasons, the former because in Gogol’s world fear has specifically masculine connotations;2 moreover, its objects are in Chichikov’s case exclusively male: he allowed no woman on his lists of souls. However, the masculine and feminine forces must come into contact with each other before they can be dramatically fruitful, and that is the task of the third, and most important, driving force: talk, rising to rumor. The ground is laid for this in the first act when, with the legal execution of the purchase deeds, the story—so far a purely private affair between Chichikov and the five landowners—enters the public sphere. Only then can the town begin to talk.

1 The World as Will and Image, vol. 1, §58. 2 See VI, 192, commented on p. 207.

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And this occurs in the very first sentence of Chapter Eight: Gogol situates the so-called inciting incident in a classical position at the beginning of the second act, where it is ideally placed to elevate Chichikov to a level from which he can then be dashed by that same power. At the height of his popularity Chichikov then takes seriously the business of choosing a bride—something that was on the one hand expected of him but on the other hand immediately spoils his favor among the ladies. And the director of the drama chooses that very moment for Nozdrev to enter, loudly announcing Chichikov’s secret and thereby tying the tragic knot. Catastrophe will inevitably follow. It is noteworthy that Gogol weaves the masculine and feminine threads doubly together at this point: the male souls with the female love story and Nozdrev and Korobochka personally as the pair behind the intrigue against Chichikov. That they are precisely the pair who overfulfill Chichikov’s plan to turn a lie into truth (in the same way that Manilov and Sobakevich over-fulfill its conceptual root in word and thing) indicates that Chichikov has himself bound the noose now tautened around his neck by male and female principals. His hamartia is duly expressed in the observation “that a foolish word didn’t mean a thing.” In this context, it is noticeable that Pliushkin, the one landowner who knows that “no one can withstand the Word of God,” does not appear at all in the later (dramatic) chapters of Dead Souls. The third act of the drama opens in Chapter Nine with the fully fledged outbreak of rumor in both feminine and masculine modalities, reflecting the twin driving forces of the drama. The women of the town concern themselves with the (false) topic of abduction, which they (likewise erroneously) connect with the chief perpetrator of rumor and notorious liar Nozdrev. He, for his part, has broadcast (for once truthfully) the real issue behind Chichikov, namely the dead souls. Far from offering a solution, however, the balance of absurdities between truth and untruth instigates general confusion, whose one clear result is a peripeteia in Chichikov’s public estimation—from desired to feared stranger. Yet it remains unclear at the end of the act for whom that turning point is threatening, Chichikov or the town officials. Chapter Ten, with the attempt on the part of the officials to identify their mysterious guest first as the robber Captain Kopeikin, then as the escaped Emperor Napoleon, drives his stock—and with it the impact of his fall—still higher, albeit only on a symbolic level. As a moral or—in the strict sense of classical drama— “noble” hero, Chichikov would fall farther than as a mere bureaucrat-turnedconman, and his drama would gain correspondingly in tragic profile. But, in fact, these speculations betray only the perplexity of his opponents and achieve no more than a suspension of action, a catastasis. Nor does the death of the Public Prosecutor offer more than the semblance of a resolution of the dramatic knot.

The Five Acts of the Drama

And as for Chichikov’s happy anticipation of a social comeback—that is pure dramatic irony. Fate threatens, but is in no hurry. Thus far, the tenth chapter of Dead Souls provides all that classical drama theory requires of the fourth act of a tragedy. But Chapter Ten offers more: the actual resolution comes with the return of Nozdrev and Chichikov into the town’s seething cauldron of rumors, although the exact turn from catastasis to catastrophe is hidden by the epic form of the novel. Gogol had to stage the protagonists’ appearances sequentially, even though perpetrator and victim learn of the effect of the intrigue simultaneously. The tragic dénouement takes place, then, in a single moment—the precise moment when rumor, the action’s mainspring, has spent its energy. What remains is for Chichikov, aware now of the fatal workings of Fama, to undergo a bitter anagnorisis, learning what a word, however foolish, really does mean. Chichikov’s shameful retreat from the municipal stage, which carries forward into Chapter Eleven, concludes the fifth act of the drama. But is it really a catastrophe when a crook, however talented, comes to grief through his own machinations? Hardly—in fact, according to Aristotle’s criteria, Dead Souls fulfills none of the ideal requirements of a tragedy. Its central character, a person known neither to history nor myth, is neither morally nor by status noble; he does nothing to inspire awe or terror, and he does not in the end fall into misery;3 on the contrary, he gets away with his crime, his flight succeeds. Moreover, the truth revealed to him in the final anagnorisis concerns only his image, not his actual self. He leaves the town of N– in outward panic but untouched by even the slightest pangs of remorse. And the adversaries from whom he flees are themselves in fear and trembling of their imminent new superior—a situation of comedy all round. It is scarcely by chance that the last five chapters of Dead Souls remind one in so many ways of The Government Inspector—not least because it is only at the end of both texts that the real drama takes off. In both works the protagonists finally land in purgatory: the officials so transfixed by Chlestakov await the second (now genuine) Government Inspector, a foreshadowing of the Last Judgment,4 and Chichikov is on the way to the second phase of his adventure, which Gogol explicitly planned on the model of Dante’s Purgatorio. The analogy between Gogol’s two works is also enlightening inasmuch as The Government Inspector has often been assimilated—in the first place by its author—to tragedy, although it is unquestionably, as Gogol hoped it would be, “more comical 3 See Aristotle, Poetics, chaps. 9, 2, and 13. 4 See Gogol’s Razviazka Revizora (IV, 130).

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than the devil.”5 That, in playing purposely in its dramatic chapters with the essential features of tragedy, Dead Souls achieves high comedy, is undeniable. To whichever genre one finally attributes those chapters, the rigor with which they obey the structural laws of classical drama is striking; and in that respect they parallel The Government Inspector. Gogol himself, in his sketch of a “Literary Primer for the Youth of Russia,” set prose narrative in close proximity to drama.6 What connects the epic with the dramatic in Dead Souls and prevents the two halves of the work from falling apart is in the first place their coherent ethical dimension. Chapters Seven to Nine provide the solution to the moral problem of the first six chapters: Why should one prefer truth to lies when lying is more profitable? Gogol’s answer is that lies in the end destroy themselves, and he demonstrates this in five dramatic acts. At first the lie flourishes; its victory before the worldly court is followed by its festal coronation and the banishment of truth. Only then does the wind change. Undermined by the lie in its public guise of rumor, the (initially) private lie resorts to what might well prove its most eloquent advocate—art. But in vain—here, too, it is cast out; not, however, by truth, but by the lie become autonomous, the lie as an end-in-itself. For an understanding of Dead Souls this last twist is of the utmost importance. Gogol approaches the age-old problem of evil—exemplified in the quintessentially Christian modality of the lie—in the form in which it has come down to us since the Middle Ages: malum privatio boni. Because it parasitically draws its nourishment only from the good, evil can in the long run never flourish. In the individual instance, as Chichikov demonstrates, the lie may have considerable success, but once the scale is widened from private to public, evil finds itself confronted with a success it can no longer control. The lie runs rampant and finally trips itself up. Banished truth, the lesson tells us, need only wait until that step comes. The central personage of the drama is admittedly impervious to its moral message. Blind to his failings, he is unable to perceive his fate as retribution and unable, therefore, to avail himself of the opportunity for change of heart and atonement. Instead of inwardly examining his conscience, he seeks safety in outward flight—a flight that is interrupted once more by a near collision with an

5 See Bodo Zelinsky, “Gogol’s ‘Revizor’. Eine Tragödie?,” Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 36 (1972): 1–40, (where the Gogol quote can be found on 1). Gogol’s “Hint to all who would like to play The Government Inspector as it should be played” describes the final state of the City Captain as “truly tragic” (“истинно трагическим”; IV, 114). 6 See Uchebnaia kniga slovesnosti dlia russkogo iunoshestva (VIII, 477, and 481–482).

The Five Acts of the Drama

unknown troika, which “like an apparition … vanishe[s]” into the distance.7 After this final ghost-like warning to reflect and repent, Chichikov sinks undisturbed into the repose of the sinner. At the same time, Gogol takes the opportunity to plumb his protagonist’s subconscious in an epilogue dedicated to his suppressed childhood as the seed-bed of his crime. The commandment Chichikov so flagrantly abuses had been instilled in him letter by letter as the first lesson of his life: “Thou shalt not lie!”—albeit a lesson of which “he had barely retained a pallid memory.” The second lesson, on the other hand, amounted to the imperative “Serve mammon!”: an admonition, we are told, which “took deep root in his soul.”8 These two injunctions chart Chichikov’s path to sin: initial good is overlaid with a pedagogy of evil until it is—in the strict sense of the word—psychologically suppressed.9 Salvation can only come from the opposite direction, from the long-submerged good of earliest childhood. That Chichikov is in principle capable of such conversion is confirmed by his accurate knowledge of the way to evil, an awareness jolted into explicit formulation by the vision of his Beatrice (which he also owed to a collision with an unknown carriage): She is now like a child; everything about her is simple—she will say whatever may come to her mind, will laugh outright wherever and whenever she may feel like laughing. One can fashion anything out of her; she can be a miracle, and she may turn out to be so much trash—and will! Just let the mamas and aunties get hold of her now.10

  7 “И, как призрак, исчезнула с громом и пылью тройка” (VI, 221).  8 The relevant texts have already been cited on several occasions: “вот бедная картина первоначального его детства, о котором едва сохранил он бледную память” (VI, 224) and: “Давши такое наставление, отец расстался с сыном …, но слова и наставления заронились глубоко ему в душу” (VI, 225).   9 See also the example of Tentetnikov in Chapter One of Dead Souls, Part Two, where Gogol’s understanding of the genesis of evil is clearly in line with orthodox teaching (see Ernst Benz, Geist und Leben der Ostkirche, 3rd rev. and ext. ed. [Munich: Fink, 1988], 20; Bernard Sartorius, Die orthodoxe Kirche [Geneva: Edito-Service, 1973], 159–182). 10 “Она теперь как дитя, всё в ней просто: она скажет, что ей вздумается, засмеется, где захочет засмеяться. Из нее всё можно сделать, она может быть чудо, а может выйти и дрянь, и выйдет дрянь! Вот пусть‑ка только за нее примутся теперь маменьки и тетушки” (VI, 93).

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CHAPTER 9

Ethos and Epic: Chichikov’s Crime and Punishment

Artists, too, are only human and above all like talking about themselves. Nor do they abandon this quality immediately they sit down to work. On the contrary, they fill their work with mirrors that, as in the paintings of the Dutch masters, show the portrait of their creator. Michael Maar, Geister und Kunst1 The chronology of Chichikov’s five landowners and the five phases of his sojourn in the town conceal an allegorical reference system that serves as a key to the actual meaning of the novel.2 Dead Souls maps out a pilgrimage of expiation, at every step of which the central character is confronted with the various faces (and facets) of his crime before just punishment is meted out to him. Where the first part of this study briefly compared Chichikov’s career with a medieval 1 Michael Maar, Geister und Kunst. Neuigkeiten aus dem Zauberberg (Munich and Vienna: ­Hanser, 1995), 13. 2 Natascha Drubek‑Meyer, Gogol’s eloquentia corporis. Einverleibung, Identität und die Grenzen der Figuration (Munich: Sagner, 1998), 300ff., rejects all attempts to read Gogol’s works from the period before the failed Part Two of Dead Souls as allegories in the medieval and Baroque tradition. Her main target in this respect is Sergei A. Goncharov, Tvorchestvo N. V. Gogolia i traditsiia uchitel′noi kul′tury (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1992), and her objection that to read Gogol in this way is to project “late interpretive directives” from his pen back onto his “whole œuvre” (Drubek‑Meyer, Gogol’s eloquentia corporis, 300) precisely captures the approaches of scholars like Thiergen and Goncharov. At the heart of the dispute is the legitimacy of such a projection. The issue need not be solved here for Gogol’s “whole œuvre.” For Dead Souls it may be enough to point out that Gogol did not study Dante’s Divina Commedia—the accepted model for the structure of his novel—only in his late phase of religious confusion. Mikhail Vaiskopf proposes an entirely different allegorical interpretation of the work based on the ­Masonic tradition (Mikhail Vaiskopf, Siuzhet Gogolia. Morfologiia. Ideologiia. Kontekst [Moscow: Radiks, 1993], 364 and passim).

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a­ ventiure, we can now question more fully the relation between Gogol’s epic and the literary expressions of this genre in the Middle Ages. Many individual works of scholarship have been dedicated to establishing the ethical structure underlying the medieval epic as a key organizational principle, the sequence of aventiuren often being dictated by a moral codex whose validity is evidenced in a dialectical process of transgression and restitution of the norm.3 “The ethical content of the tale and the meaning and form of its literary expression are interdependent, each conditioning the other”4—this central insight of research into the medieval epic can be applied without reservation to Dead Souls. This necessarily implies that the common classification of Gogol’s novel as satire should be revised. The late Gogol may have objected a trifle too strongly against that designation: Dead Souls certainly has elements of satire. But its fundamental direction is quite different. Mikhail Bakhtin, who lent his authority to what since Belinsky had been the accepted genre ascription, was at least aware of its difficulty and attempted to get around the problem with a caveat. Gogol, he argued, had successfully composed a Menippean satire, but one that was permanently dislocated by the pathos of its narrating voice: Pathos intruded as a foreign body into the world of Menippean satire and, becoming a positive abstraction, broke continually out of the work. Gogol could not succeed in one and the same work with one and the same figure to pass from Hell through the Mount of Purgation to Paradise. A seamless transition was impossible.5 Is Dead Souls, then, an imperfect satire? Bakhtin has overlooked two factors. First he underestimates the extent to which the narrated world realizes in ­concreto 3 See, for example, Karl-Friedrich O. Kraft, Iweins Triuwe. Zu Ethos und Form der Aventiurenfolge in Hartmanns “Iwein”. Eine Interpretation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1979); Karl Heinz Göttert, Tugendbegriff und epische Struktur in höfischen Dichtungen. Heinrichs des Glîchezâre “Reinhart Fuchs” und Konrads von Würzburg “Engelhard” (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1971); D. Mieth, Dichtung, Glaube und Moral. Studien zur Begründung einer narrativen Ethik (Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald-Verlag, 1976) (with reference to Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan). All three works provide further references. 4 Kraft, Iweins Triuwe, 28. 5 Michail Bachtin, Untersuchungen zur Poetik und Theorie des Romans, trans. Michael Dewey; ed. Edward Kowalski and Michael Wegner (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1986), 492. Susi Frank takes a similar line to Bakhtin with her thesis that “Gogol failed in his literary project for Parts Two and Three of Dead Souls because … he proposed a concept of pathos that was historically … attested but incompatible with the literary ideas of his time” (Susi K. Frank, “Pathos und Leidenschaften in Gogol’s ‘Die Toten Seelen,’” in Leidenschaften literarisch, ed. Reingard M. Nischik [Konstanz: Universitäts-Verlag Konstanz, 1998], 224f.).

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what the narratorial voice proclaims in abstracto. To give but a single example: Sobakevich does not consume a massive fish in its entirety just so that the narrator can show him up as an inordinately greedy Russian landowner. Gogol presents us on the one hand with (a caricature of) the eating of a symbol of Christ, on the other with an analogous sin from Chichikov’s own past. The figurative meaning does not exclude the satirical (or vice versa), but in the overall structure of the novel it carries more weight. In other words, for the interpretation of Dead Souls, Erich Auerbach’s critical approach is more helpful than Bakhtin’s. Furthermore, Bakhtin overlooks the degree to which Part One of the novel is governed by the principle of development. The frequent accusation that the work is essentially static does not take account of Gogol’s decisive portrayal of Chichikov’s character as the fruit of a dynamic process of becoming6—an aspect the present study has been at pains to trace. Already in 1952 Dmitry Chizhevsky cited the overall developmental structure of the work as an argument against its classification as satire;7 to which Jurij Striedter objected that “to call [Dead Souls] simply an entwicklungsroman seems unjustified even when”—like Chizhevsky— “one lays emphasis on its planned continuation.”8 If, however, unlike either of these scholars one allows that Part One of Gogol’s novel is already in its own right a covert entwicklungsroman, the scales of argument tip back in favor of Chizhevsky.9 More than anything else, the actual course of Chichikov’s development, with its odyssey through the labyrinth of the world leading to final conversion, resembles the Baroque novel,10 exemplified here in Comenius’s Labyrinth,   6 Miroslav Drozda aptly and succinctly characterizes Chichikov as a “character of movement” (Miroslav Drozda, Narativní masky ruské prózy. Od Puškina k Bělému: Kapitoly z historické poetiky [Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1990], 91).   7 See Foreword, note 32.   8 Jurij Striedter, Der Schelmenroman in Rußland. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des russischen Romans vor Gogol’ (Berlin: Harrassowitz, 1961), 284. Striedter also rejects the classification of Dead Souls as a picaresque novel, arguing that the traditional picaro is invariably a first-person ­narrator—a formal objection that is, however, relativized by the striking affinity of the narrator of Dead Souls with his picaresque hero (see Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 77–92). Gogol seems, in fact, to have played in a particularly sophisticated way with the picaresque genre.   9 On the concept of entwicklungsroman vs bildungsroman see research documentation in R. Selbmann, ed., Zur Geschichte des deutschen Bildungsromans (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988). Chichikov’s formative path, one may surmise, was to consist in the undoing of his deformation through the utilitarian teaching of his father and society. 10 The conversion of the protagonist typical of the Baroque novel is readily compatible with Gerigk’s conclusions regarding Dead Souls that Gogol sought in Part Two of the work to “change the anthropological premises” underlying Part One (Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Entwurf einer Theorie des literarischen Gebildes [Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1975], 13). Taking this a step further, one might argue that Gogol also sought to change his own anthropological

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which shares with Dead Souls its theme of “banished truth.” The technique of masking that development, on the other hand, suggests still earlier models. Not for nothing did Gogol title his inaugural lecture at St. Petersburg University “On the Middle Ages” and formally model his trilogy on the Divina Commedia.11 The interpenetration of structural development and ethical content in Part One of Dead Souls reaches a level of refinement that need fear no comparison with the medieval epic, perhaps not even with Dante. Apart from—and more importantly than—such aesthetic evaluations, it was obviously close to Gogol’s soul to put his love of invention in the service of such a relentlessly strict ethical construct. And this drive of will and instinct, which cannot, except by force, be separated from his autotherapeutic endeavors, gave us Dead Souls—its wonderful Part One as well as its failed Part Two. Was Gogol then a Chichikov?12 Perhaps not. But let us turn the equation round: Chichikov is not exactly a Gogol, but he does possess a classical feature of the poet: he is a great liar. Gogol, we know, loved to compile lists of names to which he might one day give fictive existence—and what else does Chichikov do?13 That unwilling scribe, drilled from childhood to add not even a curlicue to his letters, plans a crime—the crime—of letter-perfect truth. Without deviating an iota from the letter of the law, Chichikov, whose childhood was submerged in drudgery, will now let the dead—by simple name-magic—work for him.14 And the estate he will purchase in this way will bear his own name: Chichikovo,15 premises. The fact remains, however, that Gogol’s entire planned development in Part Two of his work is already latent—consciously laid down and artfully concealed—in Part One. Part Two’s alteration of the anthropological premises is thus already programmed in Part One. 11 Gogol’s lecture O srednikh vekakh is printed in VIII, 14–25. On Dante’s general significance for Gogol see Introduction, note 47. It is significant for the role of the Commedia as a model for Dead Souls that the path of Dante’s pilgrim was already understood in the fourteenth century (for example, by Pietro Alighieri) as a “storia interna di un’autocoscienza” (see Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. Umberto Bosco [Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970], vol. 2, 102; I am grateful to Christof Weiand for this observation.) 12 Weiner, By Authors Possessed, 87–92, and Frank, “Pathos und Leidenschaften,” 216, list parallels between the narrator and the central character of Dead Souls. 13 In connection with the name problem, Gogol’s letter to Zhukovsky of November 12, 1836, commenting on the work in progress, sheds light on the latent autobiographical tendency of Dead Souls: “Знаю, что мое имя после меня будет счастливее меня, и потомки тех же земляков моих, может быть, с глазами влажными от слез, произнесут примирение моей тени” (XI, 75). 14 See Andrej Sinjawskij, Im Schatten Gogols, trans. S. Geier (Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna: ­Propyläen, 1979), 342–346. 15 “Чичикова слободка” VI, 240. See also Gogol’s draft of a letter to Belinsky in late July–­early August 1847: “Вообще у нас как‑то более заботятся о перемене ний и имен” (XIII, 442).

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banishing for ever his fear that he might disappear from the world “like a bubble on the water, with nary a trace, leaving no descendants, and bequeathing neither property nor an honored name.”16 In a letter of the young Gogol we read: “A cold sweat broke out on my brow at the thought that I might be destined to turn to dust without so much as a single fine deed to mark my name. To be in the world and not to mark one’s existence seemed to me terrible.”17 One more feature links Chichikov with his creator: his unremitting patience—first apparent in his tenacious adherence to the path of sin, but finally, as a Christian virtue, showing him the way to salvation.18 Chichikov “evinced a patience before which the wooden patience of the German is as nothing.”19 Gogol, too, ascribed “iron patience” to himself20 and early on saw this as a precondition for rising in the social order. “With patience and sangfroid you will attain everything”—it is not the traveling salesman of the dead that utters these words, but the author of Dead Souls.21 Dead Souls is a parable22—the parable of one who worked his way up from early bondage to the letter to the point where he seemed to possess the power to waken the dead to life with a simple word. But reanimation of that kind is

16 “Пропал бы, как волдырь на воде, без всякого следа, не оставивши … честного имени” (VI, 89). 17 “Холодный пот проскакивал на лице моем при мысли, что, может быть, мне доведется погибнуть в пыли, не означив своего имени ни одним прекрасным делом—быть в мире и не означить своего существованя—это было для меня ужасно” (Gogol’s letter to Petr P. Kosyarovsky of October 3, 1827; X, 111). 18 See Thomas à Kempis, Imitatio Christi, bk. 3, chap. 12 and 19: “Acquiring Patience in the Fight against Evil” and “True Patience in Suffering Injustice.” A parallel to Chichikov’s tenacity in pursuing his goal can be found in the letters of the young Gogol: “предчувствие вошло в грудь мою, что вы не почтете ничтожным мечтателем того, который около трех лет неуклонно держится одной цели и которого насмешки, намеки более заставят укрепнуть в предположенном начертании” (Gogol’s letter to Petr P. Kosyarovsky of­ October 3, 1827; X, 112). 19 “Словом, он показал терпенье, пред которым ничто деревянное терпенье немца” (VI, 238). 20 “при моем железном терпении” (Gogol’s letter to his mother of December 15, 1827; X, 117). See also the letter to Kosyarovsky of September 8, 1828 (X, 133). 21 “Терпением и хладнокровием всё достанешь” (Gogol’s letter to M. A. Maksimovich of June 27, 1843; X, 326). See also the letter to his mother of June 3, 1830 (X, 177f.) and the already mentioned letter to Zhukovsky of November 12, 1836, which speaks of patience in connection with the work on Dead Souls (XI, 75). 22 Amberg argues for an intermediate position between the poles of satire and allegory (see ­Lorenzo Amberg, Kirche, Liturgie und Frömmigkeit im Schaffen von N.V. Gogol’ [Bern, Frankfurt, New York, and Paris: Lang, 1986], 164–174). However, his premises in critical theory disallow a priori any autobiographical reading of the figure of Chichikov (ibid., 169) and hence eliminate an essential reason for doubting the primarily satirical intention of Dead Souls.

E t h o s a n d E p i c : C h i c h i k o v ’s C r i m e a n d P u n i s h m e n t

always trickery.23 And the trickster, thinking back over his own life, ascertains that “all … humane impulses” have been “abandon[ed] … on the road.” From this conclusion sprang the Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, the Confession of an Author and all the other documents of Gogol’s final crisis: a different expression, no more than that, of the same inner suffering—a suffering that bears the name “literature.”

Figure 15. Gogol in a half-opened book. Drawing by Gogol shortly before his death

23 See Sinjawskij, Im Schatten Gogols, 355.

237

List of Sources for Illustrations

Figure

Source

Frontispiece

VI, 16

1

A. M. Gordin, ed., N. V. Gogol′ v portretakh, illiustratsiiakh, dokumentakh, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel′stvo, 1959), 162

2

Timo Haapanen, Handschriften und Altdrucke (MS.) des Slavischen Instituts der Universität Heidelberg (Heidelberg: Univ.-Bibl., 1986), ms. 23, sheet 38r

3

Haapanen, Handschriften und Altdrucke, ms. 23, sheet 51r

4

VI, 568

5

Haapanen, Handschriften und Altdrucke, ms. 13, sheet 265v

6

VI, 336

7

Bernard Sartorius, Die orthodoxe Kirche (Geneva: Edito-­Service, 1973), 236f., fig. 17

8

Johann Amos Comenius, Das Labyrinth der Welt und das Paradies des Herzens, trans. Zdenko Baudnik ( Jena: Diederichs, 1908), frontispiece

9

Haapanen, Handschriften und Altdrucke, ms. 13, sheet 255v

10

XIV, 152

11

Joachim Camerarius the Younger, Symbolorum et emblematum ex aquatilibus et reptilibus desumptorum centuria quarta (Nuremberg, 1604), emblem no. 53. Library of the State of Lower Saxony and University of Göttingen

12

Hieronymus Sperling, Troiano regio Principi Paridi delatum praerogativae iudicium inter Junonem, Venerem et Minervam … (Augsburg, n.d. [c. 1750]), emblem no. 20. Bavarian State ­Library, Munich. Drawn and engraved by Hieronymus Sperling (1695–1777). Latin text by Philipp Jakob Croph (1666–1742), cited in Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1967), col. 1317

13

Andreas Alciatus, Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531), emblem no. A7. Augsburg State and City Library. Woodcuts by Jörg Breu the Elder (c. 1476–1537)

14

Gabriel Rollenhagen, Gabrielis Rollenhagii selectorum emblematum centuria secunda (Utrecht, 1613), emblem no. 90. Duke Augustus Library, Wolfenbüttel. Drawn and engraved by Crispin de Passe (c. 1565–1635) and sons. Text composed or selected by Gabriel Rollenhagen (1583–1619)

15

Igor′ P. Zolotusskii, Gogol′, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1984), after 416

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D.  Feasting and Scandal Albert, Karl. “Metaphysik des Festes.” In his Philosophie der Religion, 239–250. St. Augustin: ­Academia, 1991. Alewyn, Richard. Das große Welttheater. Die Epoche der höfischen Feste. 2nd ext. ed. Munich: Beck, 1989. Bachtin, Michail [Mikhail Bakhtin]. Literatur und Karneval. Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur. Translated by Alexander Kaempfe. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1990. Bollnow, O. F. “Zur Anthropologie des Festes.” In his Neue Geborgenheit. Das Problem einer ­Überwindung des Existentialismus, 195–245. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955.

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259

Index

Afanas’ev, A. N., 161n183 Agin, A., xvii Aksakov, I. S. 2n6 Aksakov, K. S., xvi Aksakov, S. T., xvi, 2, 2n8, 2n9, 24n8 Alcibiades 89n194 Alighieri, Dante, xxi, 3, 9–10, 23n4, 124n18, 125, 132n49, 134, 140, 178, 183, 209, 212, 229, 232n2, 235 Alighieri, Pietro, 235n11 Amberg, L., 35n9, 53n72, 122n9, 132n52, 133n58, 133n59, 236n22 Annenkov, P. V. 118n51 Arendt, H., xxii, 9–12, 15, 19, 97, 142n104, 208n110 Aristotle, 114n40, 217–18, 229 Arnoldi, L. I. 82n177 Auerbach, E. 234 Augustine, A. xxvi, 5n31, 111, 112n28, 112n30, 113n37, 114–15, 117n48, 123n14, 142n105, 142n108 Bachelard, G. 79 Bacon, F., 177, 179, 181 Baker, P., xxivn25 Bakhtin, M. M., xix, 192n46, 233–234 Baruzzi, A., 104n3 Becker, R., 133n56, 133n57 Belinsky, V. G., xvi–xviii, xx–xxi, 2, 24–25, 233, 235n15 Bely, A., xviii, xxv, 26, 29, 31, 79n164, 99n6, 140, 155–56, 193 Benz, E., 99n7, 231n9 Berthold of Regensburg, 113, 114n37 Blochel, I., 156n167

Bojanowska, E. M., xvin2, xx Booth, W. C., xxivn25 Bosch, H., xxi Boss, V., 143n114 Bossuet, J. B., 113n36 Brentano, C., 115n46 Bröcker, W., 111n27 Burckhardt, J. 193n53 Bylinin, V. K., 43n38 Caillois, R., 192n49, 193n54 Čelakovský, F. L., 121n1 Cervantes Saavedra, M. de, 213 Chaucer, G., 179 Chekhov, A. P., xxii Chernyshevsky, N. G., xvii, 148n131 Chizhevsky, D., xix, xxvi, 2n12, 23n4, 34n3, 43n38, 178n3, 178n4, 234 Claviez, T., xxivn25 Clinton, H., xv–xvi Clowes, E. W., xxv Comenius (Komenský), xxvin32, 9n44, 43, 96, 99–100, 178, 234 Curtius, E. R., 41n30, 110n21, 115n43, 125n22 Danilevsky, A. S., 100n10, 108n16 Daumier, H., xvii, xxi Davis, T. F., xxivn25 Delumeau, J., 181n16 Dickens, Ch., xvi Dmitry (Tuptalo) of Rostov, 113n36, 178 Dobrolyubov, N. A., xvii, 148n131 Dönninghaus, S., 178n3 Donovan, J., 192n45

262

Index

Dörrie, H., 153n153 Dostoevsky, F. M., xxii, xxvn30, 10, 11n51, 64n111, 113, 141n97, 193 Drozda, M., 234n6 Drubek-Meyer, N., 3n18, 41n30, 232n2 Dunbar, R., 177 Durkheim, E., 192 Eaglestone, R., xxivn25 Ebbinghaus, A., 60n97, 206n102 Eckhartshausen, K., 215 Eikhenbaum, B., xvii, 17n68, 28, 29 Fanger, D., xix, 24n7, 26, 28n25, 31 Farino, E., 133n56 Fonvizina, N. D. 113n34 Francke, A. H., 9n44 Frank, S., xix, 85n183, 127n28, 233n5 Franz, M. L. v., 133n56 Freeborn, R., 23n4, 29 Freud, S., 192 Fröbel, F., 9n44 Fusso, S., xix, 58n91, 115n46, 125n22, 138n82, 139n83 Gadamer, H.-G., 188n34 Gass, W. H., xxvn27 Gerigk, H.-J., xxivn25, 3n19, 26, 31, 135n69, 198n74, 208n111, 223n164, 234n10 Geyer, C.-F., 208n110 Giesemann, G., 9n47 Gippius, V. V., 2n6 Goerdt, W., 148n131, 178n3 Goethe, J. W., xxvin32, 23n4, 141–146, 148n132 Gogol, M. I. (mother), 4, 7n40, 7n41, 17n67, 236n20 Goncharov, I. A., xxii Goncharov, S. A., xviin3, 41n30, 43n38, 100n11, 232n2 Görland, A., 112n30

Gorlin, M., 215n137 Göttert, K.-H., 233n3 Gottfried of Strasbourg, 233n3 Goya, F. de, xvi Graevenitz, G. v., 208n110 Gray, R., xviin3–4, xxin17 Gregory Nazianzen, 123n14 Grekova, E. V., 213n128 Griffiths, F. T., xix Grimm, J., 114n37 Gronicka, A. v., 143n114 Guerney, B. G., 44n45, 81n173, 137n80, 161n180 Günther, H., xix, 78n157 Haag, H., 143n110 Haase, F., 44n41 Hämäläinen, N. xxivn25 Hansen-Löve, A. A., 12n57, 19, 99n8 Hardie, P., 179n7 Heers, J., 192n46 Heftrich, E., 4 Hegel, G. W. F., xxii, 33, 188n34 Heidegger, M., 111n26, 151, 223 Heier, E., 31n35 Heldt, B., 26n16 Henkel, A., 129n34, 158n175, 203n89 Herzen, A. I., xvi, 155 Hesiod 179n7, 180 Hitchcock, A., xvi Hoffmann, E. T. A., xxi, 215, 215n137 Holl, B. T., 213n128 Homer, xvi, xxi, 9, 10, 104, 106n10, 108–111, 116, 118–20, 130, 131n45, 134, 138, 171–72, 179 Huizinga, J., 193 Ingham, N. W., 215n137 Ingold, F. P., 79n166 Innokenty (Borisov, I. A.), 113n36 Isaiah, 125n21

Index

Jenness, R. K., 106n11 John (the Evangelist), 165 Jonas, H., 26n18 Jones, M. V., 11n51 Justin (Martyr), 115n43

Lotman, Iu. M., xix, 156n167, 212n125, 213nn128–129 Lounsbery, A., xix, xxin16, xxvin31 Lubkoll, C., xxivn25 Lyubich-Romanovich, V. I., 46n53

Kant, I., xxv–xxvi, 104n3, 112, 119n53, 127n28, 188n34, 190 Kapp, V., xxivn25 Karamzin, N. M., 127n28 Karlinsky, S., xviii, 3, 26n16, 108n16, 135n68, 155n165, 203n89 Kegler, D., 178n3 Keil, R. D., 1n3, 4n23, 4n27, 5, 5n29, 170n210, 212n124, 214n131 Kerényi, K., 131n44 Kierkegaard, S., 115n46 Konstantinovsky, M. A., 5, 6n32 Koporskaya, E. S., 89n193 Koschmal, W., 208n109 Kosyarovsky, P. P., 236n17, 236n18, 236n20 Kotzebue, A. v., 179 Kouba, P., 153 Kovács, Á., xix Kraft, K.-F., 233n3, 233n4 Kraus, A., 7n36 Krivonos, V., 41n30, 52n69, 93n203 Kukolnik, N. V., 1n3

Maar, M., 232 Machiavelli, N., 152 Maguire, R. A., xix, 9n47, 25n13, 108n16, 122n4, 130n41, 136n74, 154n156, 168n203 Mahal, G., 141n94, 142n105 Maksimovich, M. A., 236n21 Mann, Iu. V., xix, 29, 49n63 Mann, Th., 4n22 Marquard, O., 208n110 Masalsky, K. P., xxvin31 Mashinsky, S. I., 92n203 Meier, C., 193n52 Merezhkovsky, D. S., xvii, xviiin6, 12 Michelsen, P., 144n119 Mieth, D., xxviin34, 233n3 Miller, A., 6n35, 112n31 Miller, J. H., xxivn25 Moritz, K. P., 132n55 Morson, G. S., 25n13, 134n64 Moses, 118

Lachmann, R., 134n62 Langer, G., 79n164, 93n205, 132n54, 156n170, 215n137 Lausberg, H., 221n157 Lehmann, J., 12n56, 12n57 Lenin, V. I., xvii Lermontov, M. Iu., 143n112 Lesage, A.-R., 213 Levinson, J. xxivn25 Lindworsky, J., 115n41 Lombroso, C., 3 Lordkipanidze, D. O., 43n38

Nabokov, V. V., xixn11, xxii, 12n57, 19n73, 24, 79n169 Nadezhdin, N. I., 148n131 Napoleon, 217, 220 Neubauer, J., 179n7, 180n10, 181n14, 189n39, 204, 217n142 Neumeister, S., 42n37 Nicholas I., 85 Nietzsche, F., 1, 5n28, 91, 103n1, 112, 113n33, 115n41, 148n131 Nikolev, N. P., 153n155 Nolte, W., 9n44 Novalis, 97 Nussbaum, M. C., xxivn25

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264

Index

Obama, B., xv Obolensky, A. P., xxin17, 145n125 Ohly, F., 131n44 Otto, W. F., 134n61, 134n62 Ovid, 132n55, 179 Pagels, E., 112n32, 143n110 Pashchenko, T. G., 1n2, 1n3 Passage, C. E., 215n137 Patočka, J., 100n10 Paul (Apostle), 5, 125n21 Peace, R., xix, 99n6 Pestalozzi, J. H., 9n44 Peter I., the Great, 214n131 Peter of Damascus, 5n31 Peters, J.-U., xx Pindar, 179 Pisarev, D. I., xvii, 148n131 Plato, xxiv, xxvi, 110–11, 187, 191 Pletnev, P. A., 24n10, 108n16 Podtergera, I., 168n203 Pope, A., 179n7 Pope, R. W. F., 11n51 Potthoff, W., 10n47 Praz, M., 115n45 Pressler. F., 99n9, 180n9 Proffer, C. R., xix, 9n47, 47n57, 99n6, 108n16 Prokopovich, N. Ia., 17n67 Pushkin, A. S., xxi, 11, 30, 108n16, 144n121, 213 Rabinowitz, S., xix Ranchin, A. M., 168n203 Rehm, W., xxii–xxiii, 11n53, 66n114, 115n43, 115n46 Ricoeur, P., xxivn25, xxv, 111n25, 119 Roche, M. W., xivn25 Rosenkranz, K., xxii Roskoff, G., 143n110 Rosset, A. O., 17 Rothe, H., 5n31, 23n4, 143n114

Rousseau, J.-J., 192 Rozanov, V. V., 3 Safranski, R., 208n110 Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E., xxii Sartorius, B., 231n9 Sazonova, L. I., 99n8 Schahadat, S., 105n6, 113n35, 226n173 Scheler, M., 201 Schiller, F., xxi, 17, 17n67, 17n68, 18, 18n69, 19n74, 20, 99, 104–107, 116–119 Schillinger, J., xviin3 Schlegel, F., 115n46 Schmidbauer, W., 140n91 Schneemelcher, W., 125n21 Scholl, D., xxivn25 Schöne, A., 129n34, 158n175, 203n89 Schopenhauer, A., 46n54, 227 Schottlaender, R., 110n21 Schreier, H., 34n3, 114n38 Schroeder, H., 153n155 Schulte, C., xxiin19 Scotus, John Duns, 142n104 Scribe, E., 170 Seidel-Dreffke, B., xviin5 Selbmann, R., 234n9 Setschkareff, V., 133n58 Shakespeare, W. xvi, 106n10, 179–181 Shapiro, G., xix, 43n38, 178n5 Shapiro, M., 10n47 Shevyrev, S. P., 1n4, 24 Sidney, P., 115n44 Siebers, T., xxivn25 Sinyavsky, A. D., xviii, 29, 133n56, 235n14, 237n23 Skovoroda, G. S., 43n38, 125n21, 178 Smirnova, A., 24 Smirnova, E. A., 10n47, 37n18, 43n38, 124n18, 132n49 Smirnova Chikina, E. S., 133n58 Sologub, F., xxii, 193

Index

Solovyev, V. S., 112n32 Sommer, V., 110n22 Sorokin, Iu. S., 12n55 Sorokin, V. G., 193 Souriau, E., 191n42 Sperling, H., 180n12 Stalin, I. V., xviii Stefan of Yavora, 43n38, 178 Stender-Petersen, A., 179n7 Striedter, Ju., xix, 234 Tarasenkov, A. T., 3n13 Tatian, 123n14 Tertullian, 180n11, 191 Themistocles, 89 Thiergen, P., xxviin34, 114n38, 185n30, 232n2 Thomas Aquinas, 113n36, 123, 146, 153, 166, 172, 199, 219 Thomas à Kempis, 5, 34, 58, 62–63, 82n177, 87n187, 236n18 Thomasin of Cerclaria, 103 Tikhon of Zadonsk, 113n36 Tikhonravov, N. S., 125n21 Trump, D. J., xv–xvi Tschilschke, Ch. v., xix, xxiiin22, 12n57, 85n183, 98n5 Twain, M., xxiii Uffelmann, D., 115n46 Uvarov, S. S., 6n33 Vaiskopf, M., xix, 9n44, 26–27, 42n37, 85n183, 87n187, 99n8, 122n4, 125n21, 159n177, 232n2 Valentino, R. S., 27, 49n63, 127n28, 146n126, 152n149, 166n197, 217n144

Vasmer, M., 194n59 Veresaev, V. V., 2n10, 46n53 Vinogradov, V. V., 12n55 Virgil, 115, 131n45, 179–80, 183, 190, 203 Voropaev, V. A., 213n128 Vysotsky, G. I., 7n39 Weiand, C., 235n11 Weiner, A., 213nn128–129, 216n139, 223n169, 234n8, 235n12 Weinrich, H., xxviin34 Weinstock, S., 110n22 Winckelmann, J. J., 170 Wischmeyer, O., xxivn25 Wittgenstein, L., xxv Womack, K., xxivn25 Woodward, J. B., xxvii, 27–28, 70n132, 78n162, 81n175, 85n182, 89n192, 130n38, 130n40, 131n46, 132, 132n54, 141n93, 158n175, 161n184, 204n94, 213n129 Würgler, A., 180n12, 181n16 Wurmser, L., 112n31 Yazykov, N. M., 113n36 Young, D. A., 3n14 Young, E., 215 Zabylin, M., 162n187 Zelinsky, B., 139n83, 230n5 Zenkovsky, V., 12n57 Zhukovsky, V. A. 3n20, 38n27, 108–9, 116, 120, 125n22, 235n13, 236n21 Zimmermann, J., xxivn25 Zolotusskii, I. P., xix, 98n2

265