The Nose and Other Stories
Page 35
22. Dmitry Donskoy (1807) was a tragedy in verse by V. A. Ozerov (1769–1816). Alexander Griboedov’s verse comedy Woe from Wit is one of the greatest masterpieces of the Russian stage. It was written in 1824 but first staged in 1831.
23. A unicorn gun was an artillery piece with a conical breech, with a unicorn depicted on it. The joke involves a general explaining the difference between a cannon and a unicorn gun to Catherine II. The joke ends with the anticlimactic punch line: “A cannon is one thing, and a unicorn gun is quite another.”
24. The gates of the Kazan Cathedral opened onto Great Meshchanskaya Street (now Kazanskaya Street), named for the social class of meshchanstvo, made up of small householders, city dwellers, and craftsmen. Many craftspeople were of non-Russian, especially German, origin.
25. William Tell (1804) was the last drama written by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), one of the two giants of German classical literature along with Goethe; his History of the Thirty Years’ War was published in 1791–1793. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a writer of fantastic tales that were hugely popular in Russia. His influence can be seen in Gogol’s stories, including the story of Piskaryov in “Nevsky Avenue” itself. The editors of PSS Mann have found several craftsmen named Schiller and Hoffmann listed in the address books of the time. Gogol lived on Ofitserskaya Street (now Decembrists’ Street) in 1831–1832.
26. Rappee (râpé) was a high-quality French snuff. Schiller’s arithmetic is a little off (two pounds of rappee at two rubles a pound is four rubles, not six), perhaps because of his intoxication.
27. Caraway-seed vodka is probably the liqueur known as kümmel.
28. The expression “horns” refers to becoming a cuckold, a man whose wife is unfaithful.
29. The General Staff was one of the highest organs of military administration, and the State Council was the supreme advisory legislative body, created by Tsar Alexander I in 1810. It was chaired by the tsar and had its meetings in the Winter Palace. The mention of Pirogov taking his complaint to the sovereign himself was censored from the original publications of the story.
30. The Northern Bee was the first major private newspaper in Russia, published by F. V. Bulgarin and N. I. Grech (see note 20 and the notes to “Diary of a Madman”).
31. The triumphal arch of the General Staff Building, designed by Carlo (Karl Ivanovich) Rossi (1775–1849) and built in 1819–1829, is one of the most striking features of the architecture of Palace Square.
32. The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was a major military and political figure who played a role in the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830. His funeral in Paris was a notable event in spring 1834, as Gogol was writing “Nevsky Avenue.”
Diary of a Madman
1. The original title of this story translates literally as “Notes of a Madman,” but I have retained the traditional English title. Before the invention of steel pens, writing was done with feathers (typically from geese), which had to be periodically sharpened. According to the editors of PSS 2009, the low-level clerks who performed this task sometimes made a specialty of sharpening quills to the particular taste of their supervisors.
2. That is, using the vy form. Russian has two second-person pronouns, the familiar form ty and the polite (or plural) form vy. Just before this and later in the story (entry for November 6), the madman’s supervisor addresses him as ty. A droshky is a light, open, four-wheeled cart.
3. Decatizing is a means of processing cloth for surface smoothness and for moisture and shrinkage resistance.
4. Later in the story, the madman reads the Northern Bee, a semi-official newspaper aimed at the middle classes. I. P. Zolotussky has discussed the fact that this newspaper would publish, next to news of foreign affairs (coups, revolutions), sensational stories of strange phenomena such as a boy born with three heads, a Dutch maiden who hadn’t eaten since 1818, a black rabbit with feathers instead of fur, a girl with two noses, and a half-woman, half-fish. Igor’ Petrovich Zolotusskii, “ ‘Zapiski sumasshedshego’ i ‘Severnaia pchela,’ ” in his Poeziia prozy: Stat’i o Gogole (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), accessed June 14, 2019, http://ogrik2.ru/b/igor-petrovich-zolotusskij/poeziya-prozy/4071/zapiski-sumasshedshego-i-severnaya-pchela/7.
5. A similar passage appears in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1819–1821), referring to the writing capabilities of a cat.
6. Zverkov’s House was the first five-story building in St. Petersburg. Gogol lived there from October 1829 to the summer of 1831. In a letter of September 1829, he had to reassure his mother that living on the fifth floor did not fatigue him at all: “The sovereign himself occupies rooms that are no lower than mine; on the contrary, up high the air is much cleaner and healthier” (Academy PSS 10: 184). Later in the story (entry for November 12), the madman goes to the “sixth floor” to get the dogs’ letters, but Zverkov’s House had no sixth floor. Whether this is a simple oversight on Gogol’s part or an indication of the increasing unreality of the madman’s world is unclear. The friend “who plays the trumpet very well” is probably a remnant of the original conception of the story as the “diary of a mad musician.”
7. The madman uses a Russified version of the French word canaillerie, “knavery.” The word derives from a term for a pack of dogs, so it resonates with the “doggie” theme in the story.
8. The Bee is the Northern Bee; see note 4. The “Kursk landowner” is probably a reference to a pseudonym, “Finnish Landowner,” used by the newspaper’s editor Faddei Bulgarin.
9. The poem is not by Pushkin but by N. P. Nikolev (1758–1815).
10. Johann Conrad Rutsch was a fashionable St. Petersburg tailor who provided clothing for Tsar Nicholas I.
11. The popular farces on themes from peasant life, Filatka and the Children by P. I. Grigoriev Sr., and Filatka and Miroshka the Rivals; or, Four Suitors for One Girl by P. G. Grigoriev Jr., were staged in the Aleksandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1831. Vaudeville was a genre of comic theater borrowed from France, which incorporated satirical songs and dances.
12. The French word équivoque means “ambiguity,” but the madman seems to be using it to mean “deceit” or “ruse.”
13. In Gogol’s time, the letter yat was identical in pronunciation to the letter ye, so only educated writers would know the correct placement of the two letters. The yat was removed from the Russian alphabet, along with several other letters, in the 1918 post-Revolutionary reform of orthography.
14. In the court Table of Ranks, gentleman of the bedchamber was rank 5, a step below chamberlain (rank 4). This position was usually held by young aristocrats in the civil service. The madman is a titular councillor, rank 9 in the civil service Table of Ranks (see frontmatter). Since promotion to rank 8 conferred hereditary nobility, many civil servants remained “stuck” at rank 9. The madman claims, however, to be of “noble descent” (entry for October 4). Irina Reyfman has written cogently about the ambiguity of the madman’s position: “On the one hand, he is portrayed as a lowly feeble-minded clerk whose service obligations seem to consist exclusively of sharpening quills for the head of his department; apparently, he is incapable of doing anything more complicated. On the other hand, not only does he have a relatively high rank but his position in the department is quite considerable; he is a desk chief, which means that several clerks are working under him. Desk chiefs were normally supposed to have the rank of court councilor [Rank 7], not titular councilor” (How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016], 110–11).
15. The mention of the sovereign was censored in the original publications of “Diary” (replaced with “baron”). The word “sovereign” was also censored from the entries for December 8 and “No date of any sort.” The pale-blue ribbon is the symbol of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, the highest order in the Russian Empire.
16. Freemasonry is a frater
nal society that apparently arose in the Middle Ages out of artisans’ guilds. It often comes into conflict with organized religion, and in 1822 Tsar Alexander I banned Masonic lodges in Russia. When beginning a civil service post, Gogol himself had to take an oath that he did not belong to a Masonic lodge (PSS Mann). Masonic organizations maintain an air of secrecy, bolstered by symbolism known only to members, such as special hand signals and handshakes.
17. Zolotussky notes that in 1833 the Northern Bee included a special rubric called “Spanish Affairs,” devoted to controversies over the succession to the Spanish throne. King Ferdinand VII of Spain (1784–1833) rescinded the Salic Law that prevented women from succeeding to the throne, so that his three-year-old daughter Isabella could inherit the throne rather than his brother Don Carlos. This led to a series of civil wars.
18. Ice hills were set up for sledding on Winter Palace Square and Elagin Island, surrounded by other popular entertainments like fair booths and performances.
19. Philip II (1527–1598) was the builder of the Spanish Empire. The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin is an offshoot of the Franciscans. It is not clear what specific historical event, if any, the madman is referring to here.
20. “Cast-iron roads” refers to the railroad, which did not yet exist in Russia. The first railroad line, between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo, was opened in 1837. The word translated here as “steamship” could in this period also apply to any vehicle powered by steam, including a locomotive.
21. The madman seems to be thinking not of a chemist but of Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
22. Hydrotherapy was commonly used to treat mental illness in the nineteenth century. Some patients died as a result of the more extreme treatments.
23. Given his Spanish orientation, the madman is probably referring to the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (the Spanish Inquisition), established in 1478 in Spain for the purpose of combating heresy, using the methods of torture and execution.
24. Jules de Polignac, Count of Polignac (1780–1847), was prime minister of France under Charles X. His policies helped lead to the July Revolution of 1830.
25. The last Ottoman ruler of Algeria, Hussein Dey, was deposed by the French in 1830.
The Carriage
1. The word in the title of the story, koliaska, is a general term for carriage, usually a two-horse, four-wheeled carriage on springs with a convertible top. Other types of carriage mentioned in the story are: brichka (usually transliterated as britzka in English), a light cart, usually not on springs, sometimes open; droshky, a light, open, four-wheeled cart; cabriolet, a light, two-wheeled, one-horse cart with one seat; and tarantass, a four-wheeled, covered, horse-drawn cart on long shafts to reduce jolting on long trips. The bon voyage is glossed in Russian sources as a four-seat carriage, although I have an unprovable suspicion that Gogol made it up.
2. A pood is equivalent to 36.12 pounds or 16.38 kilograms.
3. In Gogol’s text, the phrase translated here as “main square” is lobnoe mesto, literally “the place of the forehead.” Although the etymology is disputed, it is possibly related to Calvary or Golgotha, the “place of the skull” on which the crucifixion of Jesus Christ took place. The most famous lobnoe mesto is in Moscow, on Red Square in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, but the phrase refers generally to a raised platform on a central square from which decrees could be read to the public and on which executions could be performed. Although executions were not performed on the lobnoe mesto in Moscow, the general sense of the phrase in the Russian cultural imagination is “place of execution,” so Gogol’s use of the phrase here for the place on which the country clodhopper is being “executed” by the soldiers is humorously bathetic. This passage was censored from the original publication of the story.
4. Faro was an immensely popular card game, immortalized in Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” (1834).
5. Pifagor is the Russian version of Pythagoras, a highly unusual if not nonexistent Russian first name. The Russian nobility held elections for district representatives and police supervisors and for the marshal of the nobility, who held a responsible position in local self-government.
6. The references to the unbuttoned uniforms and visible suspenders of the officers were censored from the original publication of the story.
7. Part of the humor in this passage is that the horse, Agrafena Ivanovna, is given a full formal name including patronymic, something that is usually reserved for humans. In his 1842 play The Gamblers, Gogol gives a name and patronymic to a deck of cards.
8. The word “tapeworm” was censored from the original publication of the story.
9. In 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia and was repelled after a prolonged and costly struggle.
10. The apron was “a piece of leather… attached to the dash or front of a carriage, used as a lap cover to protect the occupants from rain or snow” (Don H. Berkebile, Carriage Terminology: An Historical Dictionary [Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978], 309).
The Nose
1. March 25 is the Feast of the Annunciation (the announcement to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel that she was to give birth to the Son of God). Mikhail Weiskopf (Vaiskopf) has demonstrated that this story is imbued with Christian symbolism and is in a sense the story of Jesus’s life on earth; it is “a travesty of the Eucharist, or more precisely, of the entire Gospel narrative of the Incarnation” (Siuzhet Gogolia: morfologiia, ideologiia, kontekst [Moscow: Radiks, 1993], 229). Given this framework, I have translated the names of the streets into English, because several of the streets named in the story refer to events in the Christian calendar, in this case the Ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven on the fortieth day after the Resurrection. In the nineteenth century, barbers also engaged in medical practices such as pulling teeth and letting blood.
2. A pood is equivalent to 36.12 pounds or 16.38 kilograms.
3. According to a decree of 1809, a titular councillor (rank 9) could be promoted to collegiate assessor (rank 8, which conferred hereditary nobility) only upon graduating from a university or passing a standardized test. Irina Reyfman points out that Kovalyov “was promoted to this rank speedily and without the required examination, in order to entice him and others like him to serve in the Caucasus during Russia’s conquest of the region” (How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016], 108). During his teaching career, Gogol himself attained the rank of collegiate assessor after passing an examination (Vinogradov 1: 29). See the Table of Ranks in the frontmatter.
4. The rank of collegiate assessor in the civil service was equivalent to the rank of major in the army. It was not appropriate for a civil servant to use a military title. Despite the equivalence between collegiate assessor and major in the Table of Ranks, military ranks bore greater prestige than civil ones.
5. Boston is a trick-taking card game that originated in the eighteenth century. It was considered a prudent, low-risk game and was popular among civil servants.
6. Small seals that were used to seal letters with wax were often personalized with coats of arms, initials, or days of the week, and could be worn as ornaments on one’s watch chain.
7. The word for nose in Russian, “nos,” is of masculine gender, so the pronouns used for it can be translated as either “he” or “it,” which poses a problem for the translator. Given the vivid personification of the nose at this point in the story, I have chosen to translate the pronoun as “he.” When it returns to being regarded as just a nose, it becomes “it” again.
8. Gogol’s original version of the story had Kazan Cathedral as the location of the meeting between Kovalyov and his nose. When Gogol sent the story to his editor M. P. Pogodin in 1835, he wrote, “If by chance our stupid censorship insists that the Nose can’t be in the Kazan Church, then perhaps he can be moved to a Catholic church. But I do
n’t think that they have gotten as senile as that” (Academy PSS 10: 355). In fact, the censor did object to this location, and in versions of the story published in Gogol’s lifetime, this scene took place in the Gostiny Dvor shopping arcade rather than in any sort of church. The Kazan Cathedral was built in 1801–1811 and is located on the corner of Nevsky Avenue and the embankment of the Catherine Canal (now the Griboedov Canal).
9. While praying, Orthodox believers frequently cross themselves and bow to the icons.
10. In the original text, the bridge is called Anichkin Bridge, which is a colloquial name for Anichkov Bridge.
11. As with his misuse of the title major for himself, here Kovalyov is flattering his friend by using the army title lieutenant colonel instead of the correct civil service equivalent, court councillor.
12. The Senate was the highest government organ in the Russian Empire, supervising the activity of the civil service.
13. A droshky is a light, open, four-wheeled cart.
14. It was forbidden to advertise the sale of serfs in newspapers, so “being offered for service” is a euphemism. The strange business hours “eight to three in the morning” are in Gogol’s original.
15. Rappee (râpé) was a high-quality French snuff.
16. Subaltern officers were of the ranks from ensign to captain; staff officers were of the ranks from major to colonel.
17. The bel étage was the main, second floor of a building, where the most expensive and prestigious apartments were located.
18. Aqua regia is a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, called “royal water” because it can dissolve platinum, silver, and gold.
19. This character was called Palageya Grigoryevna earlier in the story.
20. Russian is rich in expressions using the word “nose,” such as the phrase I have translated as “to lead you around by the nose.” The phrase can be literally translated as “to remain with your nose,” meaning “to be left holding the bag.”