by Viv Groskop
It’s hard to understand why Bulgakov would take on such a play. You have to wonder what he thought the best-case scenario was. Possibly, he felt threatened and unable to say no. Possibly, he was intrigued and wanted to challenge himself. Going by his letters and diaries, it was probably a bit of both. Or perhaps he would have done anything to get a bit of extra time and money so that he could work on the secret manuscript of The Master and Margarita.
As the play was being prepared, a team from the Moscow Art Theatre was sent to Batumi in August 1939. On the way there, they received news that Stalin did not want the play to be performed. Bulgakov would have been notified shortly after the killing of Zinaida Reich, the wife of the playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold. She was an exceptionally beautiful actress who was killed in her apartment, aged forty-five, stabbed seventeen times (including directly in her eyes) by two attackers believed to be from the NKVD (later the KGB). First, this was someone known to Bulgakov and his wife. Second, this was a sign that no one was safe. Three years before, Meyerhold had written an attack on Bulgakov’s work in a theatre magazine. If anything, Meyerhold was less subversive than Bulgakov and should have been better protected from the regime.
Some of the saddest bits in the Bulgakov letters and diaries are where his wife writes in a tragic Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells sort of way: ‘Misha is considering writing a letter to the authorities.’ A strongly worded letter, surely! This is after seventeen of his works have been suppressed over a ten-year period, he is drowning in debt and self-loathing, he has burned loads of his manuscripts and he is suffering from a terminal illness. It’s the Englishness of the Bulgakovs’ life that I love and which also breaks my heart. They don’t want to complain too much. They occasionally buy some nice clothes to cheer themselves up. They make a special note in their diaries when they eat something rather delicious. They consider writing somewhat brusque letters to Stalin (but don’t actually write or send all of them, at least not in the latter years). They have quietly and politely given up, without quite admitting it to themselves. And yet, somehow, they keep going, Bulgakov continues writing and his wife’s sister carries on, sceptically and resentfully, typing up the novel that she thinks is so rubbish it’s embarrassing. They try hard – so hard! – to keep their sense of humour.
Even in the final months of his life, Bulgakov manages a wry smile when the sanatorium staff put him on a ‘blended’ diet. ‘Mostly vegetables in all forms, and fruits. The one and the other are fearfully dull … And anyway it’s so important for me to be able to read and write that I am even prepared to chew such rubbish as carrots.’ By this point, his eyesight is failing and he knows that his kidneys are packing up. Still, he jokes: ‘As you know, there is only one decent way of dying, and that is with the help of a firearm, but unfortunately I do not possess such a thing.’ Laughing, always, even when life is at its blackest. Perhaps especially when it is at its blackest.
Bulgakov may not quite have realized it himself, but it was his sense of humour that kept him alive. He has a take on things that feels modern and fresh. (Think Woody Allen: ‘I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’) Here was a brilliant satirist who, because of censorship, was unable to find an audience for his jokes during his lifetime. And he was living through a moment in history which was so close to a joke that it was almost beyond parody. And yet he secretly found a way to bring it to life, in the pages of a book dominated by Satan. Bulgakov had something of the jester about him until the last, as Akhmatova suggests in the poem she wrote for him after his death:
I offer this to you in place of graveside roses,
Instead of smoking incense;
You lived so severely, and to the end you carried
Your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, you were an incomparable jester,
And gasped for breath between stifling walls,
And you yourself let in your awesome guest,
And with her you remained alone.
10. How to Avoid Hypocrisy: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
(Or: Don’t buy non-existent peasants as part of a get-rich-quick scheme)
‘Just let me forget it and not know anything about it and then I’ll be happy.’
Once the whole ‘Russian’ thing collapsed, I backed away from Russia for a while. It helped that my life had changed radically in the meantime. I now had three children. Very occasionally, I would meet people and they would say, ‘Oh, you speak Russian! How marvellous! Do your children speak Russian?’ And I would see the lie I had told myself. You are only really ‘from’ somewhere if you want to speak to your children in that language. That would never have been the case. ‘I think it would be a bit pretentious to talk to them in a language that isn’t my native language,’ I would reply weakly, taking the small-talk question too seriously. ‘Oh, that’s a shame for them. It would give them such an advantage,’ the person would say brightly. And what advantage exactly would that be? So they could pretend they were Russian too, and then find out they weren’t?
Into my mid-thirties, a part of me clung on to the idea that I could still incorporate Russian things into my life. But this plan was becoming more theoretical with every baby that came along. Nonetheless, with each of my children, I took them on assignment to places which were really inappropriate: to Odessa, to Moscow. There were moments when I thought, ‘Do I really want to be doing this?’ I can remember changing a nappy on the floor of an art gallery in Moscow, waiting to do an interview with the novelist Ludmilla Petrushevskaya for a newspaper. I was happy to be there and doing what I wanted to do. But I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Hmm. I wish I was at home on maternity leave.’ Of course, if I had been at home on maternity leave, I would have been sitting in front of daytime television lactating and weeping about why I wasn’t on assignment in Russia. It was like I was inside my own version of Three Sisters, only actually in Moscow, wishing that I was not in Moscow. Or, as Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich would say: we always think the other person is holding a bigger radish in their hand. I was always in the wrong place, wishing that I was holding a different variety of radish.
Eventually, though, I had to reconcile myself to the fact that I had enough home-grown produce of my own to be getting on with. And my radishes were not Russian radishes. They were English radishes. My children were a great reminder of this. They, very sensibly, have no desire to learn Russian, even though they are occasionally amused to hear me speak it. And why should they? They know what their roots are and, knowing them, are not especially obsessed with them. The reason I was obsessed was because I was in the dark. Now that things were out in the light, it didn’t grip me quite as much. Strangely, I didn’t have an overwhelming desire to visit Łódź, where my ancestors came from. In fact, instead I became gradually more conscious – and embarrassed – by the fact that I’d completely overlooked my mother’s roots in Northern Ireland in favour of something more foreign and alienating.
And yet, without being Russian, things had turned out in such a way that I have this wonderful connection to Russian because I have studied it for so long and because it has been so close to my heart all this time. I almost feel as if this is a better connection than one that occurs by birth. Russian is not family for me. You can’t choose family. But it is a very good lifelong friend. They say friends can be better than family sometimes. Because you choose your friends. This is a friend I chose by accident and decided to stick with.
All the same, there was something hideous about what I had done. I’d allowed myself to get carried away with a romantic idea. It was self-involved and even a bit pompous. I had made myself into a Gogolian caricature: a grotesque, the English country girl who fancies herself more exotic than she really is. The only comfort to me once I began to realize this was the thought that human beings are essentially stupid and we all do incredibly foolish things all the time and it’s not even necessarily that unattractive, which is why we don’t see the stupidity of the behaviour when we’re
doing it. The appeal of Chichikov, the horrible anti-hero of Dead Souls who buys non-existent serfs to make himself look like a landed gent, is his chutzpah. He breezes through life as if he’s touched by stardust. Sometimes, we quite like people who are arrogant or self-serving – if their charade is entertaining enough. I’d have had to have a lot of chutzpah to pass myself off as Russian. Now, the mask was off.
Gogol warns that it’s one thing to fool others and another to fool ourselves. We frequently pretend that we’re being ‘honest’ or ‘open’ when in fact we’re doing something for our own benefit. I had pretended to myself that I was studying my Russian roots for the sake of authenticity. But it had been anything but authentic: it was a fiction I had invented for myself. Similarly, Chichikov argues that he’s ‘helping’ others by acquiring their ‘dead souls’. Really, all he wants is for everyone to see him as rich and powerful. Hypocrisy is an easy trap to fall into: we convince ourselves so easily that we’re doing the right thing because we don’t want to see that we’re doing the convenient thing – or the thing that just makes us feel better about ourselves.
While being undeniably Russian, Dead Souls comes across as the most English of all the Russian novels. It has a Dickensian feel to it, with characters who are reminiscent of Wilkins Micawber, Uriah Heep or Miss Havisham. A mysterious stranger called Chichikov arrives in the town of N—. He visits a series of landowners, making an identical offer to each of them: he would like to purchase the names of any dead serfs they have registered on the census. This doesn’t seem like a bad deal. If they ‘sell’ the ‘dead souls’, the landowners can stop paying tax against the serfs who have died on them. (As one landlady explains: ‘The people are dead, but you’ve got to pay like they’re alive.’) And Chichikov can ‘own’ many serfs, thereby reinventing himself as an aristocrat. What could possibly go wrong? Except, of course, that this is a phantom transaction, involving the transfer of the names of dead people from one man’s ownership to another. It’s essentially a meaningless deal. But if it means so much to Chichikov and he’s willing to go along with it and front up the money …? Well, why wouldn’t you?
Chichikov’s victims are, of course, initially sceptical. (‘Really, my dear sir, I’ve never yet had occasion to sell deceased folk.’) They are caught between wondering whether this offer is too good to be true and thinking to themselves that they must be able to get a better deal elsewhere if this man is willing to pay so much for so little. But, like the landlady who has no list of her dead serfs except in her head (and even then seems to know them only by a series of made-up names: ‘Don’t-Respect-the-Feeding-Trough’, ‘Cow-Brick’ and, my favourite, ‘Ivan the Wheel’), they all give in eventually to Chichikov’s smooth talk.
Dead Souls was seen to be a controversial and mysterious title. Gogol also insisted on giving it the rather strange and unnecessary subtitle ‘Poema’ – ‘An Epic Poem’. He added this as if to underline that it is not a novel, it is something more than that. Or perhaps he meant it ironically, or satirically. There is a lot of disagreement on this point. Of course, it’s not a poem in the usual sense of a poem, it’s very clearly a novel, and a fairly conventional episodic novel at that. We are meant to think it is like Homer’s Odyssey or Dante’s Inferno.
One of the themes of the Inferno is that we must accept the consequences of our own moral vision. Gogol surely intended to repeat this lesson here: Chichikov’s morality is dubious. He needs to dupe other people in order to survive. In the first part of Dead Souls, he barely gets his comeuppance (although he is exposed as a cheat and a liar). It is thought that in the next two parts Gogol had planned, one way or another, he would have tortured Chichikov and sent him to hell. Similarly, a key message in Homer’s Odyssey is the importance of loyalty to family. Chichikov has no family and no allegiances. He is a lonely and pathetic figure who belongs nowhere.
This is a novel about wealth, greed, hypocrisy and status. Chichikov wants to cheat the system by faking his wealth: the number of souls you owned indicated your fortune. Of course, you were not supposed to acquire large numbers of dead souls, but you were taxed according to how many serfs you originally owned. That number also conferred other advantages on you, offering the possibility of acquiring loans or mortgages. Gogol had happened upon the flaw in the system: what if someone never had any serfs but bought everyone else’s dead ones? Couldn’t that person end up richer than everyone else? And what sort of person would that make you? The answer: not a nice one.
Chichikov has all the clothes and all the patter of someone who deserves respect in Russian high society. The subservient, snobbish and self-serving characters he meets on his travels soon fall prey to his charms. But then he has a rapid reversal of fortune. Once he has acquired four hundred dead souls, Chichikov’s plan is revealed as a cynical get-rich-quick scheme. He was intending to take out a loan against the souls and disappear with the money. He becomes a figure of hatred and suspicion, with some gossiping that he was going to elope with the governor’s daughter and others speculating that Chichikov is, in fact, Napoleon in disguise. He flees to another part of Russia, where he masterminds a similar scheme, this time attempting to acquire an estate and forge a will, which results in his arrest. This was only Part 1 of a three-part novel, and it ends mid-sentence, with the prince who arrested him opining on this ‘scandalous matter’. This is a book in which no one comes out of it looking good. Everyone is an anti-hero. It’s a warning about life that’s about as subtle as a burning cross: abandon hope all ye who enter this kind of moral universe.
In real life, Gogol was not a tedious, moralizing prig, however. Instead he was the most adorable of all the Russian writers because he was the greediest. He wasn’t even hypocritical about it: he knew what he was like and freely admitted it. His biographers call his favourite pastime ‘gourmandising’; I call it ‘stuffing your face’. He was a man who loved to eat and suffered all his life with chronic indigestion, a lot of it caused by overindulgence. He wasn’t necessarily the politest dinner guest. He loved rolling up bread into pellets and firing them at other people. And if he didn’t like a drink, he would just pour it back into the decanter. He was a good host, though. He loved macaroni and had his own special recipe for it. And he liked to make punch. According to some accounts, he also claimed to be the inventor of a cocktail of boiled goat’s milk and rum called Gogol Mogol. He didn’t entirely invent it, however. From the seventeenth century onwards kogel mogel was a sort of Jewish eggnog with eggs, honey and milk, sometimes served as a cold remedy. Who can blame Gogol for wanting to own it himself, especially when it sounded as if it was named after him? (Apparently, Barbra Streisand’s mother served her this drink as a child – without the rum, sadly – to strengthen her voice. It clearly worked.)
In photographs, Gogol does not look like you might expect. He can be a tiny bit porky-looking, but nothing excessive. He’s actually quite good-looking, with a dashing pencil moustache and a sleek feminine bob. He was known for the attention he paid to his wardrobe, and he was the king of the frock coat. Still, all that food had an effect, and he died shortly before his forty-third birthday. All the overeating would have done nothing for his health. And yet when it came to it, in the end, he more or less starved himself and died in a state of utter misery. (And you thought Dostoevsky was a nightmare.)
Gogol was born in 1809 and died in 1852, at the age of forty-two. (All my favourites died young: Gogol, Bulgakov, Chekhov. The difficult ones – Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy – just went on and on.) His work is seen as bridging the gap between Pushkin’s idea of ‘the first Russian novel’ and the big classics of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that came later. The language he uses in his books is seen as being ‘simple Russian’. He, supposedly, had a ‘poor knowledge’ of Russian, which is a very odd thing to say about one of your country’s greatest novelists. But all that is meant by this is that he doesn’t use flowery language and classical references in his work. His novels are the stuff of the everyday, even in their titles: overc
oats, noses, government inspectors. His books are not psychological studies or social commentaries (although, of course, under the surface they are both these things). They are about day-to-day life: offices, kitchens, hotels, streets, carriages. There is always a lesson about integrity: don’t pretend to be something you’re not, you’ll get found out.
This quest for telling it like it is comes out in all Gogol’s depictions of eating. It’s almost as if he’s so desperate not to be a hypocrite about his own greed that he overdoes it. From the beginning of Dead Souls, you can feel Gogol’s obsession with fatness, thinness, hospitality, social eating and the business of feeding. Gogol is often referred to as being the master of the grotesque, and his fascination with food comes into this. But there is also something very joyous about him. He’s like a snorty little pig sniffing out truffles, except the truffles are interesting (and, yes, sometimes gleefully grotesque) characters. There are no subtleties in his descriptions. The opening chapters describe how there are two types of men: fat and thin. The thin men lean into the ladies. The fat men know to stay away from the ladies. (Say what you like, but I can’t help feeling that he has really got this right. Usually, the more portly someone is, the more aware they are of invading personal space. But if you are skinny and agile, you can get away with brushing up against others.) Don’t pity the fat ones, though, because they are always the ones who come out on top in Gogol: ‘The fat ones of this world know how to manage their affairs better than the thin ones.’
