by Stuart Kelly
Heinrich Heine
{1797–1856}
LIFE RESISTS SYNOPSIS. In the case of Heinrich Heine, any attempt at summary is especially likely to be a distortion: he is everywhere evasive and contradictory, and every outright opinion is elsewhere balanced by qualification or mockery. The “last king of Romanticism,” the “first man of the century,” he was the high priest of the cult of self, and that self was incorrigibly multiple.
Heine’s broad spectrum of acquaintances reads like a Who’s Who of nineteenth-century European culture. He was taught by August Schlegel and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His lyric poems were set to music by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, and he provided the plot for Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. At salons he mixed with Balzac, Nerval, Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, Hans Christian Andersen, and Karl Marx. Yet he seems not to have had a single true friend, with the possible exception of his long-suffering publisher, the radical Julius Combe, whom he berated and praised in equal measure.
In addition to being a lyric poet, Heine was a journalist, travel writer, political agitator, and cultural mediator between France and Germany, often infuriating both. His most exquisite poems of romantic longing and frustrated desire are shot through with ironic self-deprecation and satirical swerves. He was committed to the ideals of liberty, and yet impugned the socialists, saying, “I agree we are all brothers, but I am the big brother and you are the little brothers.” He underwent a religious conversion at the same time as he was incapacitated by eight years of excruciating paralysis, but quipped on his deathbed that he did not fear judgment since forgiveness was God’s stock-in-trade. He was born into a Jewish family, and was prone to virulent outbursts of anti-Semitism.
It is easier, in some ways, to describe what Heine was not. Although he was a voluminous writer, there were nonetheless projects that eluded him and manuscripts that he destroyed. After his conversion, he burned poems that had the merest whiff of blasphemy about them: “better to burn the verses than the versifex,” he maintained.
He was not a novelist, even though he attempted three times to write a novel. The first foray, The Rabbi of Bacherach, was started in 1824, and published in part in 1840. The second, From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski, was an imitation of Tristram Shandy, but, according to Heine, it “miscarried” in 1833. Florentine Nights was rejected by his regular publisher in 1837 as being too short to escape the automatic censorship required by the Metternich government. The mob, apparently, did not read long books, hence the exemption.
Heine was not a philosopher, though he claimed to have burned his study on the works of Hegel. He claimed Hegel was “the greatest philosopher Germany has produced since Leibniz,” but lampooned him in correspondence, saying that, when reading him, “one’s brain freezes in abstract ice.” Heine’s study of Hegel may have been destroyed, but one cannot help but suspect that Hegel’s deathbed words—“only one person has understood me and he doesn’t understand me either”—would have been singularly apposite.
Throughout his life, he begged from and vilified his fantastically wealthy uncle Salomon, and protracted negotiations about his will widened an already gaping chasm with the rest of the family. Heine’s trump card was a piece of rather distasteful blackmail. He threatened to write about the family. Although his published Memoirs have a glowing encomium to Uncle Salomon, they are typically cavalier with other facts. Heine’s brother, Maximilian, incinerated five or six hundred pages of autobiography after his death: we might presume that this manuscript gave a more explicit account, and one which the family feared might be libelous. That said, it was the sycophantic version Heine chose to publish. He was not un-self-interested.
In his earliest play, the rather dire Almansor, Heine again seems shockingly prescient: “when books / are burned, sooner or later people will be burned as well.” He destroyed his works in a futile attempt to burn away his own inconsistencies.
Joseph Smith Jr.
{1805–1844}
IF THE “QUOTATION” below looks like gobbledygook, that is because it is. Nonetheless, this fictitious orthography, denominated by its inventor as “Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” is responsible for the founding of Salt Lake City. It is the only evidence of the language from which Joseph Smith Jr. claimed to have miraculously translated the Book of Mormon. It comes from a slip of paper headed “Caractors,”
which was given to Martin Harris, who later paid for the publication of the book. Harris had shown it to a Columbia professor in order to establish the authenticity and provenance of the antique texts. Whatever scholarly mayhaps, possiblys, and perchances the academic hedged around his opinion evaporated in the mind of the gullible Harris, and the poor classicist had to issue strongly worded denials when it transpired that he was being quoted as authoritatively declaring the squiggles to be genuine ancient writing.
The “Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics” are not the most far-fetched aspect of the Joseph Smith story: he himself said, “I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not believe it myself.” He was the poorly educated son of an impecunious farmer and onetime ginseng exporter, who became a prophet, a self-appointed lieutenant-general, and a presidential candidate, and is venerated today by millions. He was murdered, or martyred, by a lynch mob in the jail of Carthage, Illinois, where he had been imprisoned for wrecking the printing press of an opponent.
In 1827, though, he was an outwardly unexceptional figure, except for a brush with the law over his claims to be able to locate Indian gold using a “peep-stone.” All that was about to change: for four years he had supposedly been visited by an angel, Moroni, who had promised to deliver into his hands a set of golden plates, when the time was right. In 1827, it was. These plates, written in the “Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” detailed the religious history of the aboriginal inhabitants of America, the virtuous Nephi and the wicked descendants of his brother Laman, and Smith was to make their content known to the world.
Once he had possession of the inscribed plates, he guarded them jealously, and would transcribe their contents while hidden behind a raised sheet. Knowing Joseph’s lack of any formal acquaintance with ancient languages, Moroni conveniently provided a pair of magic spectacles, called the Urim and Thummim, which allowed him to understand the chronicles. After an infraction, Moroni confiscated the glasses, and Joseph was forced to read the symbols by putting his head inside a large hat containing his peep-stone, with the actual text beside him. Secretaries took dictation, but were forbidden to look at the golden plates on pain of divine punishment. In 1829, the results of his endeavors were published as the Book of Mormon.
Setting aside the celestial messenger, and whether or not the golden plates really existed, we might start with the glasses, or rather their name. The Urim and Thummim are mentioned in the Pentateuch and the early historical books of the Old Testament, though what they actually are is open to contention. Exodus 28:30 and Leviticus 8:8 tell us they adorned the breastplate of Aaron, the brother of Moses and first high priest. They evidently had some prophetic function, since at 1 Samuel 28:6, Saul cannot communicate with God, either through dreams, prophets, or the Urim. Numbers 28:21 confirms that they were used for some form of divination. It has been suggested that they were used in rhabdomancy or bone-casting. Nowhere is it said that they can be balanced on the nose and ears, or that they are in any way translucent.
A little piece of outré biblical knowledge was embellished into a whole legend. What is striking about the Book of Mormon is not how extravagant its notions are, but how closely they reflect its own time. Smith’s choice of Egyptian was perfectly canny, given that the Rosetta stone would not unlock the meaning of hieroglyphics for an English audience until 1837. Likewise, the final battle where Mormon and the Nephite remnant succumb to their Lamanite oppressors makes sense of Indian burial mounds, which amateur anthropologists of the period believed could not have been erected by the indigenous tribes. No less a person than
President William Henry Harrison subscribed to the belief that the barrows were the result of a cataclysmic battle where the “Moundbuilders” were extirpated by the Iroquois. Cotton Mather believed the Indians to be a lost tribe of Israel. The Book of Mormon chastises, allegorically, Freemasons and Roman Catholics; it freely adapts less well-known biblical passages and parts of an anthropological study entitled A View of the Hebrews and even incorporates dreams recorded by Joseph Smith’s mother.
Mark Twain’s witticism “chloroform in print” ably describes the book. It is repetitive (140 of the first 200 sentences begin with “And,” and Twain himself counted over two thousand occurrences of “And it came to pass”), ludicrously anachronistic (wheels and cities being two of the most unlikely pre-Columbian features), and frequently prone to theological error (Jesus, for example, is born in Jerusalem). Yet it somehow founded a religion. Whether we attribute its success to the provision of a peculiarly American testament, or its justification of European settlement (the white Nephites being the true owners of the New World, not the red-skinned Lamanites), or the particular foment of dissenting sects in the years following the American Revolution makes little difference to its impact.
From the outset, the new “Mormonites” were keen to stress the veracity of the Prophet’s vision. Three men, including Martin Harris, swore an affidavit affirming the reality of the books, the presence of Moroni, and the divine nature of the transmission (although all three were eventually excommunicated). Smith obtained a papyrus with genuine hieroglyphics, which he translated as “The Book of Abraham”; and though experts are now able to compare an informed translation with the account of the star Kobol and a racist explanation of Africans that Smith came up with, the Mormon church has become no less expert at countering such claims. “Egyptian hieroglyphics had at least two (but more probably three) meanings, the one understood by the masses—the other comprehended by the initiated, the priesthood,” wrote George Reynolds in 1879. Smith did not “get the translation wrong”; he was translating a different, allegorical level of the text. It is much the same reasoning that Origen applied to the New Testament.
There was, however, one document that would prove to be a thornier problem for the Mormon church. Smith began his translation in 1828, with Harris committing it to paper. Harris’s wife was less than convinced by the story of golden plates, magic spectacles, and angelic intervention, and Harris pleaded with Smith to allow him to take the 116 completed pages to her, in order to prove their reliability. She stole the manuscript. “I have lost my soul!” Harris wept. “All is lost!” groaned Joseph. “If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it,” Lucy Harris argued.
Moroni must have been less than impressed that the Chosen One had managed to go and lose the new Bible. After all, Jibra’el had never had this kind of problem with Muhammad. He petulantly retracted the use of the Urim and Thummim, and, instead of simply starting from scratch again, insisted that the lost pages would be replaced by a different work, the Plates of Nephi, which concentrated on the ecclesiastical history. It would, of course, differ slightly, but not, hopefully, materially.
The pages purloined by Lucy Harris have never been discovered, and, given the extent of anti-Mormon propaganda in the 1830s, it seems likely that if she had been able to produce the first version of the revelation, she would have done so. Even with the caveat that it was derived from a different source, any inconsistencies would have been difficult to explain away, and it might have proven to be a mortal blow to the nascent cult’s credibility. It is presumed that she destroyed the manuscript: however, there is a slim chance that it still exists somewhere, a sheaf of handwritten pages that could topple a religion. Unless it is already safely under lock and key in Salt Lake City’s copious archives.
Nikolai Gogol
{1809–1852}
IN 1845, GOGOL burned the manuscript of Part II of Dead Souls for the first time. “It was hard to burn the work of five years, achieved at the price of such morbid tension, every line of which cost me a nervous disorder,” he wrote; “the moment the flames had consumed the last sheet of my book, its contents were reborn, luminous and purified, as the phoenix from the ashes, and suddenly I saw how chaotic was all I had supposed to be orderly and harmonious.”
Even before this drastic action, Gogol had been cagey, to say the least, about the continuation of the book. He had reluctantly read some of it to a friend, Alexandra Smirnov, but had desisted abruptly when the first rumbles of thunder began to crack. “God himself,” he said, “does not want me to read something unfinished.” Many of his friends knew that he had staked much on Part II of Dead Souls. To both Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnev he had compared Part I to an overture for a work of unsurpassed importance. It was “no more than the portico of a palace rising within me.”
Part I of Dead Souls introduces Chichikov, a jovial, dandyish, vaguely abominable businessman, who arrives in the town of N. He rapidly makes the acquaintance of all the officials and landowners, and inveigles himself into their social calendar and provincial hierarchy. After a while he makes a tour of the landowners with a curious proposition. In order to tax them, the state reckons the size of their estates according to the number of serfs, or souls, they possess, and a census is carried out to determine this figure. Chichikov’s proposal is to buy the serfs that have died, but whose names still feature on the census. It alleviates their tax, and he gains—well, he tells different people different stories as to why he needs dead souls. Is it illegal? No one knows. If it is a crime, it is born out of byzantine bureaucracy and feudal oppression. After all, selling living, breathing humans is perfectly acceptable.
Eventually, suspicions are aroused; but they are inflamed more by an anxiety that Chichikov has not paid each landowner the same amount for their dead souls than by any inkling of a demonic pact. But Chichikov escapes scot-free, his carriage speeding through N. and Gogol delivering a paean on the troika. The last direct speech is attributed to the typical Russian, who loves the speed and “mad carouse” of a hurtling troika: “To hell with it all!” The editor Mikhail Pogodin captured some of its sinister power when he described it as being like “a long corridor along which he dragged the reader and his hero Chichikov, opening doors left and right and showing a monster seated in every room.”
When Dead Souls appeared in 1842 (with the title altered by the censor to Chichikov’s Adventures, or, Dead Souls, since the soul was immortal: Gogol had mordant fun with this in Part II), it was to thunderous applause. Pletnev wrote an enthusiastic review under a pseudonym in The Contemporary, where he echoed Gogol’s conception of Part I. It was “a curtain raiser intended to elucidate the hero’s strange progression.” Vossarion Belinsky, the rising radical critic, called it “the pride and honor of Russian letters.” Gogol left Russia for Europe, claiming the continuation involved some kind of pilgrimage.
Although Gogol’s friends sympathized with his aesthetic ambitions, they were becoming increasingly aware that there was a manic element to Part II. Gogol believed that literary Russia had been “awaiting me as though I were some sort of Messiah.” The triptych he envisioned of Dead Souls covered Crime, Punishment, and Redemption: it was nothing less than a Divine Comedy of the Steppes, to use Henri Troyat’s phrase. Gogol referred to it as “the history of my soul,” and dropped odd hints that he had now “acquired the strength to undertake my sacred journey . . . only then will the enigma of my life be resolved.”
Part I did contain passages implying something greater to follow. At the beginning of chapter 7 he contrasts two kinds of writers. There is one who “feels drawn to characters which reveal the high dignity of man,” by whom “young, ardent hearts are thrilled” and for whom “responsive tears gleam in every eye . . . He had no equal in power—he is a god.” The other is forced to show “all the terrible, shocking morass of trivial things,” and the public will “rob him of his heart and soul.” Which kind of writer would Gogol be?
&nb
sp; Gogol had never been particularly reliable, or honest, with his friends, and had often relied on them to extricate him from financial crises. His behavior, now, exasperated them. The long-suffering and sponged-from Pletnyev referred to him as a “devious, selfish, arrogant and suspicious creature.” Gogol dropped ever more arcane insinuations about the true meaning of Part I. “For the time being it is still a secret, which will suddenly be revealed to the stupefaction of one and all (for not a single reader has guessed!).” “I shall starve to death if I must,” he wrote to Stepan Shevyrev, “but I shall not produce a superficial and incomplete work.”
A few chapters of Part II have survived. There are satirical cadenzas on eccentric reformers, utter gluttons, and world-weary loafers; these are joined by unbelievable paragons: the landowner Kostanjoglo, the official Murazov, and the Prince who is both the “callous instrument of justice” and the “intercessor for you all.” From these brief glimpses, little can be gleaned of Chichikov’s moral conversion. Part III, it was hinted, would have taken him to Siberia, as a penitent. The complete Dead Souls would do no less than precipitate a total religious transformation of Russia.
Having burned his first attempt at Part II, Gogol’s fanaticism intensified. He had intended to go to Jerusalem to give thanks for Part II: now he would go there to pray for inspiration. He also published the ill-advised Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends in 1847 before leaving. This justification of absolutism, which contained such sentiments as “A State without an absolute monarch is an orchestra without a conductor” and “The peasant must not even know there exist other books besides the Bible” earned him the unremitting enmity of Belinsky and caused profound embarrassment to his friends. Sergei Askakov lamented that “the best that can be done is to call him a madman.” Belinsky, more irate and more eloquent, berated the “apostle of ignorance” and maintained that “everything must be done to protect the people from a man who has lost his mind, were that man Homer himself.”
