“Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you understand who is standing in front of you? Do you understand that, do you understand it? I’m asking you.”
At this point he stamped his foot, raising his voice to such a high note that even a non–Akaky Akakievich would have been terrified. Akaky Akakievich was utterly stunned; he staggered, he started shaking all over and could not stay standing. If the guards had not come running up to support him, he would have tumbled to the floor with a plop; they carried him out almost motionless. And the significant personage, satisfied that the effect had exceeded even his expectations, and quite intoxicated by the idea that his word could even deprive a person of their senses, gave a sidelong look at his friend to see how he was taking it, and not without satisfaction did he see that his friend was in a most indefinite condition and was even beginning to feel some terror on his own behalf.
Akaky Akakievich had no memory of how he came downstairs, how he came out onto the street, none of it. He could not feel either his arms or his legs. He had never in his whole life been so scorched by a general, and one from a different office at that. He walked through a snowstorm that was whistling along the streets, his mouth wide open, stumbling off the sidewalks. The wind, as is the St. Petersburg custom, was blowing on him from all four directions, out of all the lanes. In a twinkling it blew a quinsy into his throat, and he made it home without the strength to say a single word; he swelled all up and took to his bed. Such is the power sometimes of an appropriate scorching! The very next day he was found to have a serious fever. Thanks to the magnanimous assistance of the St. Petersburg climate, the illness progressed more quickly than might have been expected, and when the doctor made his appearance, after taking his pulse, he could find nothing better to do than to prescribe a poultice, solely in order that the patient would not be left without the beneficent aid of medicine; but nevertheless, he immediately pronounced that in a day and a half he would certainly be kaput. Then he turned to the landlady and said: “And you, madam, don’t waste any time, order him a pine coffin immediately, because an oaken one would be too expensive for him.”
Whether Akaky Akakievich heard these fatal words pronounced, and if he heard them, whether they had a devastating effect on him, whether he regretted his wretched life—none of this is known, because he was in delirium and fever the whole time. He was constantly having visions of phenomena, one stranger than the next: At one moment he saw Petrovich and was ordering him to make an overcoat with traps in it for the thieves he kept imagining under the bed, and he was continually calling the landlady to drag one thief out from under his very blanket; the next moment he would ask why his old housecoat was hanging in front of him when he had a new overcoat; then he imagined that he was standing in front of the general, listening to the appropriate scorching, and was saying: “I’m sorry, Your Excellency!”—then, finally, he even used foul language, uttering the most terrible words, so that his old landlady even crossed herself, having never heard anything like it from him before, especially since these words followed immediately after the words “Your Excellency.” Then he started talking complete nonsense, so that it was impossible to understand anything; all you could see was that his disorderly words and thoughts kept tossing and turning around the single subject of the overcoat.
Finally, poor Akaky Akakievich gave up the ghost. They did not place either his room or his belongings under seal, because in the first place, there were no heirs, and in the second place, only a very small inheritance remained, namely: a bundle of goose-quill pens, a quire of white official paper, three pairs of socks, two or three buttons that had come off his trousers, and the housecoat that is already familiar to the reader. Who inherited all this, God knows. I have to admit, not even the narrator of this story was interested enough to find out. They took Akaky Akakievich away and buried him. And St. Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakievich, as if he had never even been there. Thus disappeared and vanished a creature who was not defended by anyone, not dear to anyone, not interesting to anyone, who did not even attract the attention of the natural scientist who never misses the chance to stick an ordinary fly on a pin and inspect it through a microscope; a creature who submissively endured office mockery and descended to the grave without having performed any extreme feats, but who all the same, if only just before the end of his life, had seen the flash of a bright guest in the form of an overcoat, which had animated his poor life for an instant; a creature on whom misfortune had then crashed down intolerably, as it has crashed down onto the kings and overlords of the world… A few days after his death a guard was sent to his lodgings from the Department to give him the order to present himself immediately, by the demand of the supervisor; but the guard had to return empty-handed, with the answer that he could not come any more, and to the inquiry “Why?,” he expressed himself in the following words: “Well, it’s like this—he died, they buried him four days ago.” That is how the people in the Department learned of the death of Akaky Akakievich, and the next day a new civil servant was already sitting in his place, who was much taller and who made his letters not in such an upright handwriting, but much more inclined and slanting.
But who could have imagined that this is not all there is to say about Akaky Akakievich and that he was fated to live noisily for several days after his death, as if in reward for a life that no one had noticed? But that is how it happened, and our poor story has unexpectedly taken on a fantastic ending. Rumors suddenly started spreading through St. Petersburg that near the Kalinkin Bridge and much farther a corpse had started to appear in the form of a civil servant who was seeking an overcoat that had been filched, and that under the pretext of the stolen overcoat it was stripping all kinds of overcoats from everyone’s shoulders, without distinguishing rank and title: overcoats with cat fur, with beaver fur, with cotton padding, raccoon coats, fox coats, bear coats—in short, all the sorts of fur and leather that humans have devised for covering their own hides. One of the civil servants from the Department saw the corpse with his own eyes and immediately recognized him as Akaky Akakievich, but this inspired such terror in him that he ran off as fast as he could and so did not manage to get a good look but saw only how the corpse shook his finger at him threateningly from a distance. Complaints started coming in ceaselessly from all directions that the backs and shoulders, not just of titular, but even of the most privy councillors, had been subjected to thorough chilling as a result of the nocturnal stripping-off of overcoats. The police got a directive to catch the corpse at all costs, dead or alive, and to punish him in the cruelest fashion, as an example to others, and they very nearly succeeded in this. To wit, in Kiryushkin Lane the policeman of a certain district had almost grabbed the corpse quite by the collar at the very scene of the crime, in its attempt to strip a woolen overcoat off a retired musician who had tootled on a flute in his day. After grabbing the corpse by the collar, he summoned two of his colleagues with a shout, and entrusted them with holding on to the corpse, while he took just one moment to reach into his boot in order to get his flat birchbark snuffbox, so as to temporarily refresh his nose, which had been frostbitten six times in his life; but apparently the snuff was of the sort that not even a corpse could stand. The policeman had hardly had time, after closing his right nostril with his finger, to inhale half a fistful with his left nostril, when the corpse sneezed so powerfully that he splattered all three of them in the eyes. In the time it took them to raise their fists to wipe their eyes, the corpse vanished without a trace, so that they weren’t even sure whether or not he had really been in their hands. From that time, policemen conceived such a terror of corpses that they were even afraid to grab the living and would just shout from a distance: “Hey, you over there, move along!”—and the corpse–civil servant started appearing even beyond the Kalinkin Bridge, inducing serious terror in all timid people.
But we have quite abandoned a certain significant personage, who was really almost the cause of the fantastic turn that our nevertheless qu
ite true story has taken. First of all, justice demands that we say that a certain significant personage, soon after the departure of poor, scorched-into-ashes Akaky Akakievich, felt something akin to regret. Compassion was not alien to him; his heart was accessible to many kind impulses, despite the fact that his rank very often kept them from being manifested. As soon as his visiting friend had left his private office, he even started meditating about poor Akaky Akakievich. And from that time, almost every day, he had a vision of the pale Akaky Akakievich, who had not been able to endure an official scorching. The thought of him disturbed him so that a week later he decided even to send a civil servant to him to find out how he was and whether in fact there was not some way to help him; and when they reported to him that Akaky Akakievich had died suddenly of a fever, he was even staggered, he heard the reproaches of his conscience, and the whole day he was in low spirits. Wishing to be somewhat diverted and to forget the unpleasant impression, he set off for an evening party at the home of one of his friends, where he found some decent society, and best of all—everyone there was of almost one and the same rank, so that he had absolutely no reason to feel constrained. This had an amazing effect on his emotional disposition. He became expansive, his conversation became pleasant and amiable—in short, he spent the evening in a very pleasant fashion. Over supper he drank about two glasses of champagne, a remedy that is well known to have a pretty positive effect on the matter of cheerfulness. The champagne imparted to him a disposition toward various emergency measures, namely: He decided not to go home yet, but to drop in to see a certain lady of his acquaintance, Karolina Ivanovna, a lady of German extraction, it seems, for whom he felt quite friendly relations. We must say that the significant personage was a man no longer young, a good husband, a respectable father of a family. Two sons, of whom one was already serving in a chancellery, and a comely sixteen-year-old daughter with a somewhat arched but pretty little nose, would come every day to kiss his hand, saying, “Bonjour, Papa.” His wife, a woman who was still fresh and even not at all bad-looking, would first give him her hand to kiss and then, turning it over to the other side, would kiss his hand. But the significant personage, although he was quite satisfied with his domestic family endearments, found it seemly to have, for friendly relations, a female friend in another part of the city. This female friend was not a bit prettier or younger than his wife, but such enigmas happen in the world, and it is not our business to make judgments about them.
And so, the significant personage went downstairs, got into his sleigh, and said to the coachman: “To Karolina Ivanovna’s”—while he himself, having wrapped himself up most luxuriously in his warm overcoat, remained in that pleasant situation, the best that can be devised for a Russian person, that is, when you yourself are not thinking about anything, but meanwhile the thoughts come into your head all by themselves, one more pleasant than the last, without giving you the trouble of chasing after them and seeking them. Suffused with satisfaction, he lightly recalled all the cheerful passages of the evening he had just spent, all the words that had made the little circle laugh out loud; he even repeated many of them under his breath and found that they were still just as funny as before, and so it is no wonder that he himself laughed heartily. From time to time, however, he was bothered by the gusty wind, which appeared from God knows where and for goodness knows what reason, and slashed at his face, throwing up lumps of snow into it, blowing up the collar of his overcoat like a sail or suddenly throwing it onto his head with unnatural force, and thus causing him endless efforts to extricate himself from it.
Suddenly the significant personage felt that someone had seized him very firmly by the collar. When he turned around, he saw a person of short stature, in an old worn-out uniform, and not without horror did he recognize Akaky Akakievich. The civil servant’s face was as pale as the snow, and he looked just like a corpse. But the horror of the significant personage exceeded all bounds when he saw that the corpse’s mouth twisted and, breathing on him the terrible breath of the grave, he uttered the following speeches: “Ah! So there you are, finally! Finally, I’ve got you like, I’ve caught you by the collar! It’s your overcoat I need! You didn’t make any efforts about mine, plus you scorched me—so give me yours now!” The poor significant personage almost died. No matter how full of character he was in the chancellery and in front of his inferiors in general, and although everyone said after one look at his manly appearance and figure: “Ooh, what character!”—here, like many other people of heroic appearance, he felt such terror that not without reason he began even to fear some kind of morbid attack. He even threw the overcoat quickly off his shoulders and shouted to the coachman in a voice not his own: “Home, as fast as you can!” The coachman, hearing the voice that was usually uttered at decisive moments and was even accompanied by something much more physical, tucked his head between his shoulders to be on the safe side, brandished his whip, and tore off as fast as an arrow. A little more than six minutes later the significant personage was already in front of the entrance to his home. Pale, frightened, and without an overcoat, instead of going to see Karolina Ivanovna, he went home, somehow dragged himself to his room, and spent the night in very great disorder, so that the next morning over tea, his daughter said straight out: “You are quite pale today, Papa.” But Papa was silent and said not a word to anyone about what had happened to him, and where he had been, and where he had wanted to go.
This incident made a powerful impression on him. He even started saying to his subordinates: “How dare you, do you understand who is standing in front of you?” much less often; if he did say it, then not before first hearing out what the matter was. But even more remarkable is the fact that from that time the appearances of the civil servant–corpse completely ceased: Apparently the General’s overcoat fit his shoulders just perfectly; at least, no more cases were heard of in which someone’s overcoat was stripped off. Nevertheless, many active and solicitous people simply did not want to calm down, and they said that the civil servant-corpse was continuing to appear in distant parts of the city. Indeed, a certain policeman in Kolomna saw with his own eyes the ghost appearing out from behind a building; but being somewhat feeble by nature, so that once an ordinary full-grown piglet that had rushed out of a private house knocked him off his feet, to the enormous laughter of the cabbies who were standing around, from whom he demanded a half-kopeck each for snuff as a fine for such mockery—so, being feeble, he did not dare to stop the ghost, but just walked behind him in the darkness until finally the ghost suddenly looked around and stopped, asking, “What the hell do you want?”—and displayed a fist of a kind you won’t find among the living. The policeman said, “Nothing,” and turned back that very minute. The ghost, however, was now much taller, had an enormous mustache, and turning his steps, it seemed, toward the Obukhov Bridge, vanished completely in the nocturnal darkness.
Notes
Introduction
1. Letter to his relative Petr Petrovich Kosiarovskii, October 3, 1827 (OS), in N. V. Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (n.p.: AN SSSR, 1937–1952), 10: 111.
2. See the interpretation by Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk, “Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol’s Dikan’ka Tales, Book 1,” Slavic Review 62, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 525–47. See also Yuliya Ilchuk, “Performing Hybrid Identity: The Editing History of Gogol’s Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki (1831–1832),” Studies in Slavic Culture, vol. 7, ed. Alyssa DeBlasio and Julie Draskoczy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2008), 28–49.
3. A. S. Pushkin, Sovremennik, 1836, vol. 1, 311–312, in I. A. Vinogradov, Gogol’ v vospominaniiakh, dnevnikakh, perepiski sovremennikov, 3 vols. (Moscow: IMLI RAI, 2011–2013), 1: 711. Hereafter cited as Vinogradov.
4. I concur here with Simon Karlinsky, who writes that Khoma “might well be the most full-blooded, sensible, and psychologically healthy of Gogol�
��s protagonists” (The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976], 88).
5. This transition has been traced in detail by the greatest scholar of Gogol, Iurii V. Mann. See, for example, “Èvoliutsiia gogolevskoi fantastiki,” in K istorii russkogo romantizma, ed. Iu. V. Mann, I. G. Neupokoeva, and U. R. Fokht (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 219–58; and Mann, Poetika Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978). See also Priscilla Meyer, “False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: ‘A May Night’ and ‘The Overcoat,’ ” in Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 63–74.
6. On the structure of Arabesques, see Susanne Fusso, Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Melissa Frazier, Frames of the Imagination: Gogol’s “Arabesques” and the Romantic Question of Genre (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).
7. Rita Giuliani [Rita Dzhuliani], Rim v zhizni i tvorchestve Gogolia, ili poteriannyi rai: Materialy i issledovaniia, trans. A. Iampol’skaia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009); and Michael R. Kelly, “Gogol’s ‘Rome’: On the Threshold of Two Worlds,” Slavic and East European Journal 47, no. 1 (2003): 24–44. Kelly writes, “For English-speaking readers of Gogol’s works, the time has come for ‘Rome’ to be translated and included in collections of his tales” (39). On the form of the story in relation to Gogol’s other works and on the nature of the city itself as a fragment, see Fusso, Designing Dead Souls, 110–14.
8. V. V. Stasov, “Uchilishche pravovedeniia sorok let tomu nazad, v 1836–1842 gg.,” in Vinogradov 3: 366.
The Lost Letter
1. The narrator, Foma Grigorievich, is a lector, belonging to a minor order of clergy charged with reading scripture in church services. The akathist is a song of praise to a saint, to Christ, or to the Mother of God. The akathist to Saint Barbara, a fourth-century martyr, was composed by the Kyiv Metropolitan Ioasaf Krokovskyi in the early eighteenth century. Prayers were made to Saint Barbara for salvation from sudden death, which makes Foma Grigorievich’s vow particularly humorous.
The Nose and Other Stories Page 33
