by Viv Groskop
Chichikov is supposed to be a dreadful person, someone who eats three pancakes in a stack, rolled up and dipped in melted butter. The monster. But really, what’s not to like about a man who wears a tailcoat of whortleberry-red hue shot through with a lighter weave? (Imagine the poor translator who had to get all that right. Whortleberry red? This jolly fruit is a sort of lingonberry, apparently. Heaven forbid Gogol should just say it’s a scarlet or crimson jacket.) He covers up this delightful piece of attire with ‘a greatcoat lined with bearskin’. That is some greatcoat. This is typical Gogol: detail, artifice, dandyism, fun. But always with a wink. Chichikov isn’t really well dressed. He’s wearing the emperor’s new clothes. Gogol has a wonderful eye for detail and a lovely way of describing small moments. When Chichikov visits a landowner, the narrator takes it upon himself to describe the landowner’s relationship with his wife: ‘They would plant such a long and languorous kiss on each other that, for its duration, a small cheap cigar could easily have been smoked to the end.’ Just as the greatcoat has got to be lined with no less than bearskin, that really does have to be an extremely long kiss. Gogol is not someone who likes to do things by halves. He is someone who is a consummate observer of others: their mannerisms, behaviour, speech patterns. These people are here because we need them for the story – and because they’re funny. But they’re also here to remind us that at least we’re not as bad as everyone else.
Dead Souls is a highly effective cautionary tale about the perils of hypocrisy. Chichikov is a ridiculous character, but he is in many ways a likeable one. He’s foppish and charmingly dressed. He is garrulous and has a turn of phrase that makes him seem attractive and entertaining at times. He has an irritatingly high regard for his own face and loves his chin so much that he strokes it as often as possible and likes to boast to his friends how perfectly round it is. (Hey, if I had a perfectly round chin, I would also do this.) He likes blowing his nose very loudly into a white handkerchief infused with eau de cologne, making a sound that is not unlike a trumpet blowing in your ear. This is described as being all rather fun and amusing. As readers, we need to see him this way because, otherwise, the book would not work: we wouldn’t believe that the landowners would be deceived by his charm and hand over their dead souls. This is Gogol showing us what we should be really careful of. Hypocrites, con men and shysters are charismatic and damn good company.
Just before Chichikov realizes that he has now obtained almost four hundred souls, Gogol allows the narrator a digression that gives some insight into the message he was trying to impart with this work, which we have to suppose he would have fleshed out more fully if he had got to the end of the intended three parts. The narrator imagines a writer who is truly happy because he tells tales of heroic types who never put a foot wrong, who achieve fame far and wide and never descend to the depths of the ordinary life. But he is not this kind of writer, he adds. He is instead the sort who seeks to ‘summon forth … all the dreadful, appalling morass of trifles that mire our lives …’ This is the writer who shows the ugly truth and whom no one appreciates. Not for him the praise of his readers or the admiration of sixteen-year-old girl fans who will fly at him, ‘head awhirl and hero-worshipful’. He continues to heap on the self-pity. This writer will never be acclaimed in his lifetime. The importance of the honesty of his work will never be understood. He will experience ‘reproach’ and ‘ridicule’. This was true of Gogol, who received stern criticism in his time. ‘Harsh is his chosen course,’ the ‘narrator’ (i.e. Gogol himself) concludes, ‘and bitterly will he feel his solitude.’ Honesty is important and noble. But it will not necessarily make you liked.
What’s cheering about Dead Souls is not only that Gogol is so funny, it’s that you can tell he can’t quite help loving the people he purports to hate, just a little bit. The novel is full of digressions designed to showcase the local characters Chichikov encounters on his travels, each one more ridiculous, pompous and self-deluded than the last. Could he show us any more clearly how we should not be behaving? One of my favourite portraits is that of the virtually comatose landowner Andrey Ivanovich Tentetnikov in Chapter 1 of Part 2, a character who has caused no end of headaches to translators. In one edition, he comes across as a romantic type: ‘… he was not a bad person, he was simply a star-gazer’. But this isn’t meant as a compliment. Other translations read differently: ‘neither a good nor a bad being, but simply – a burner of the daylight’ (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation). And this: ‘a fellow crawling between earth and heaven’ (Guerney and Fusso translation). All Gogol means is that this man is a layabout, a good-for-nothing, a lazybones, an idler. He makes this very clear by the end of the section: ‘… Tentetnikov belonged to that species of people who are in no danger of becoming extinct in Russia, and who formerly bore such names as sluggards, lieabouts and couch-warmers’. These are exactly the people Gogol wants to skewer in this book. And yet, boy, does he make them seem amusing.
Things go badly for Tentetnikov after an altercation with the General, whose daughter he hoped to court. Tentetnikov gets fed up with the General referring to him in conversation as ‘my friend’ and ‘my very dear fellow’, as he thinks it’s overfamiliar and patronizing. When the General finally uses ty instead of vy for ‘you’ to him (like tu and vous in French), Tentetnikov loses it completely and breaks off from the family. In the aftermath of this event, he becomes even more slothful and couch-warming than usual: ‘His pantaloons even found their way into the parlour. On the elegant table in front of the sofa lay a pair of greasy braces, as if they had been set out as a refreshment for a guest.’ (Only Gogol the gourmand could see a pair of braces on a table as looking like they’d been presented as a snack.) This is the moment when Chichikov enters the poor man’s life, seeking someone new to scam. Tentetnikov becomes the catalyst for Chichikov’s second adventure, when he convinces Chichikov to talk to the General on his behalf to repair relations between the two of them.
Tentetnikov, like dozens of other characters, is the embodiment of poshlost’, the fascinating Russian characteristic most closely associated with Gogol. Known as a virtually untranslatable word (and we all know how much I hate that idea), it means something like ‘trashiness’, ‘tackiness’, ‘vulgarity’, ‘triviality’. It has a moral weight to it: once you have succumbed to poshlost’ as an individual, your life is worthless. Nabokov defined it as ‘the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive’. Sometimes, I wish Nabokov were still alive so that he could meet the Kardashians. The idea of hypocrisy is wrapped up in there, too. Gogol’s job in Dead Souls is to show us that these people may believe themselves to be important and significant but, in fact, they are anything but. Someone who is poshliy (the adjective from the noun) doesn’t know it; otherwise, they would stop themselves. Gogol evokes poshlost’ at every turn, but he does it in such a way that you feel as though he loves these people, too. It’s as if he can’t quite bring himself to condemn them. Or perhaps it’s just that he’s brought these characters to life too vividly and so it’s too easy to identify with them. (Or maybe I am just poshlaya and so I identify with the trash. This is very possible.)
Gogol had a bizarre childhood and perhaps an overly close relationship with his mother. She, at least, was a fervent supporter of his, although possibly too fervent. She believed him to be the best Russian author ever. Not an unreasonable thing if your son is a successful, published novelist. (‘Pushkin who?’) But she also believed that Gogol had invented the steamboat and the railway. It’s good to have a supportive parent, but really. He hadn’t even invented the Gogol Mogol, let alone the steamboat and the railway. One of Gogol’s biographers, David Magarshack, writes, somewhat mournfully, I like to think: ‘She pampered him as a child and was mainly responsible for his becoming a capricious egotist.’ (Don’t sit on the fence! Poor Gogol.)
Gogol is surely the most openly neurotic of all the Russian writers. He was fond of telling people that he had been to see a doct
or in Paris who had told him that his stomach was upside down. This was a man for whom hypochondria became ‘a way of life’, as another biographer, Richard Peace, puts it. He almost enjoyed being ill, because it meant he could move from one European spa town to the next, always looking for some kind of self-improvement and never having to return to Russia. He often wrote to his friends about his ailments in great detail. From a letter in 1832: ‘My health is exactly as it was when we met, except that my diarrhoea has stopped and I now have a tendency towards constipation.’
He did a lot of things towards the end of his life that made him very unpopular. When there was a gala performance of The Government Inspector in a theatre, he insisted on sitting on the floor in his box so that no one could see him. Presumably, from this position, he couldn’t really see the play. When the curtain came down and people called for the author of the piece to take a bow, he crawled out of the box and ran out of the theatre and down the street. This was probably because of shyness and embarrassment, but when people heard what had happened they took it for immense arrogance.
He wrote a lot of unintentionally entertaining things in his letters from abroad: ‘There is such a large number of vile faces in Russia, that I could not bear to look at them. Even now I feel like spitting when I remember them.’ He can hardly be blamed for wanting to stay abroad for years at a time. He always seemed to find himself lovely friends, often ones who would lend him money, or at least take him out for excellent meals. In Baden Baden (where else?) at one point, he becomes friendly with a princess who makes a point of always serving him a special compote. (Not a euphemism.) The ‘deceptions’ of his later life were usually about the clash of his high living with his vows of asceticism. On the one hand, he wanted to party hard. On the other, he wanted to tell everyone that he was writing the world’s greatest moral literary masterpiece and that he himself was a great moral and spiritual leader. He would write to his friends that he was living ‘like a monk’ and then go out for dinners that gave him the worst indigestion. It was around this time that he became obsessed with the aforementioned Barbra Streisand drink.
Peace gives a fantastic rundown of all his terrible qualities: ‘his obsession with illness; his apparent asexuality; his flight from passion or from stagnation with constant travel; the strange treatment of his friends; his many deceptions …’ (And this is a relatively sympathetic biographer.) The strange treatment of his friends refers to the latter part of his life, when Gogol started to follow a peculiar religious path which meant that nothing he could do was quite spiritual enough. And he began to force himself to renounce his previous works as ‘sinful’. (Sound familiar? Hello, Tolstoy.) He took a great deal of pleasure in finding fault with himself as part of this spiritual quest and wrote endless letters to his friends, begging them to list all his deficiencies. He found this practice so fruitful that he began to write back to his friends, listing all their deficiencies in return, even though they had not asked him to do this. Oh, Gogol! In later life, he fell under the influence of a mystic who succeeded in convincing him that all his work was a sin. He burned most of Part 2 of Dead Souls, instantly regretted it and died nine days later, having refused all food.
I often wonder whether Gogol was just born a century too early. He was eccentric in a way that would have been regarded as odd in any era. (He once ordered a new wig as a treatment for writer’s block, contradicting Solzhenitsyn’s later statement that Russian writers never suffered from this problem. Gogol hoped the wig would ‘open up the pores of [his] scalp’.) But a lot of his passions were connected to his sexuality: there is now a theory that he was almost certainly gay, at a time when he probably found it impossible to love another man, even privately. We don’t know for certain. Intriguingly, there is a gap in his correspondence with one close friend, Danilevsky, that suggests that something happened between them. Maybe it was something wonderful but it just couldn’t last. Or maybe it was a horrific moment when Gogol offended his friend in some way. We can’t know. I do hope he knew some kind of love. He did later write that he really enjoyed playing billiards with Danilevsky and that the sound of billiard balls clacking together was one of the things in the world that made him happiest.
Gogol had something of a twentieth-century manner about him in the way that he saw the world, which is almost reminiscent of Salvador Dalí. In a letter from Rome in 1838, he wrote about the spring roses: ‘I know you won’t believe me, but I am often overcome by a mad desire to be turned into one enormous nose – to have nothing else, no eyes, no hands, no feet, except one huge nose with nostrils the size of large buckets so that I could inhale as much of the fragrance of spring as possible.’ I hope, wherever he is, he is wearing a giant nose costume and playing billiards with his best friend.
What is satisfying about this theory of his sexuality is that it does explain a lot about Gogol: to our modern eyes, he seems to have been unnecessarily tortured. Dostoevsky’s pains were very much ones that he brought on himself with his often terrible character, his gambling and his inability to face his demons (and, most likely, the not very advanced treatment of his epilepsy). Tolstoy’s suffering was largely caused by his obsession with morality. Some of Gogol’s suffering was self-inflicted, but I also have a lot of sympathy for the theory that he couldn’t express his sexuality. This must have been torture for a man who considered a lack of hypocrisy as one of life’s greatest virtues. He longed to impart this very modern lesson to others: be yourself, don’t pretend to be something you’re not, accept yourself for who you are – but he was unable to live it out himself.
11. How to Know What Matters in Life: War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy
(Or: Don’t try to kill Napoleon)
‘We thought it was the end of the world, but it turned out for the best.’
After the shock of realizing that my Russian adventure had all been a sham, a fiction I had dreamed up in my own imagination to make myself feel more exotic or to feel like I belonged somewhere, I came to develop a more fluid attitude towards my identity. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be fixed. It’s not something that is gifted to you, whether by birth or by ancestry. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do. That’s the most important lesson: it’s all just a ride. You might as well enjoy the view and count your blessings.
And while Russia may not be a part of my blood heritage, it’s a part of the life I have lived, and that can never be changed. Russian is not something that I will ever master, regardless of what my roots are, but it is something that can bring me great joy from the attempt at mastery alone. I will never give up on the language, and I will never give up on trying to understand these books. I never really needed to pretend to be Russian to get into them in the first place. That was just a story I told myself. I hope I would have found them anyway, in the way that any other normal person gravitates towards these books, because they are the ones that have stood the test of time. Now, I can enjoy them like any other reader, instead of having the pressure of thinking, ‘Ah, yes, these are my people …’ Which they never were in the first place.
I approached a re-reading of War and Peace from this new perspective of embracing imperfection. One of the most important things about the novel for anyone who hasn’t read it, and also for anyone who has tried to read it and supposedly ‘failed’, is to understand that to read this novel is not a one-off task. Reading it is the work of a lifetime. There’s no such thing as ‘failing’ to read War and Peace. You just haven’t got enough practice in yet. It’s essential to regard it rather like riding a bicycle. There will be a first time, when you wonder how anyone can ride a bicycle at all. There will be times when you ride the bicycle frequently and it seems like second nature. Maybe you will even feel like you are in the Tour de France. And there will be times when your bicycle-riding is so rusty that you wonder if it’s worth bothering with because you will probably cause an accident, resulting in physical damage, if not to yourself, then to others. The key is to keep getting
back on the bicycle.
The reason this relaxed approach is so important is that War and Peace, perhaps more than any novel, has come to represent ‘Russian literature’. So the person who puts himself or herself off it for whatever reason (by insisting on a perfect, flawless reading experience, for example) risks putting themselves off not only Tolstoy’s work but the whole of Russian literature. Don’t think of War and Peace as a novel. Think of it as the Bible. You wouldn’t expect to sit down and read the Bible cover to cover, would you? And if there were bits of the Bible you found boring, you wouldn’t let it put you off reading it for ever, would you? And yet this is what people do all the time with War and Peace. (In fact, you might easily get put off reading the Bible. That comparison has collapsed rather too easily. Forget I said the Bible. It’s not like the Bible. It’s like a lot of novels mushed together.)
It has taken me years to realize all this. I didn’t read War and Peace properly (really properly) until I knew it was going to be on television. Of all the Russian books, it is the most daunting, the most intimidating and the most full of pages. So many pages. Despite my own passionately held belief that no one should ever be put off by any book ever, this one put me off for a long time. A first attempt suggested to me that there was just too much skirmishing. Seriously. The word ‘skirmish’ is on virtually every page. Plus, there are over five hundred characters. It’s meandering and, at times, confusing. Henry James categorized the classic novels of the nineteenth century as ‘large, loose, baggy monsters’. And War and Peace is the largest and the loosest and the baggiest monster of them all. James also called it ‘a fluid pudding’. In short, it is a bloated, blubbery Godzilla of a blancmange.
