Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

  The letters he wrote to his friends while working on Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends did not include these passages (if they had, Gogol would not have been Gogol), but they much resemble them both in matter and tone. He thought some of them so inspired from above that he requested their being read "daily during the week of Fast" ; it is doubtful however whether any of his correspondents were sufficiently meek to do this—to summon the members of their household and selfconsciously clear their throats—rather like the Mayor about to read the all-important letter in act one of The Government Inspector. The language of these epistles is almost a parody of sanctimonious intonation but there are some beautiful interruptions, as when, for instance, Gogol uses some very strong and worldly language in regard to a printing house which had swindled him. The pious actions which he plans out for his friends come to coincide with more or less bothersome commissions. He developed a most extraordinary system of laying penance on "sinners" by making them slave for him—running errands, buying and packing the books he needed, copying out critical reviews, haggling with printers, etc. In compensation he would send a copy of, say, The Imitation of Jesus Christ with detailed instructions telling how to use it—and quite similar instructions occur in passages concerning hydrotherapy and digestive troubles—"Two glasses of cold water before breakfast" is the tip he gives a fellow sufferer.

  "Set aside all your affairs and busy yourself with my own"—this is the general trend—which of course would have been quite logical had his correspondents been disciples firmly believing that "he who helps Gogol helps God." But the real people who got these letters from Rome, Dresden or Baden-Baden decided that Gogol was either going mad or that he was 36

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  deliberately playing the fool. Perhaps he was not too scrupulous in using his divine rights. He put his comfortable situation as God's representative to very personal ends as, for instance, when giving a piece of his mind to persons who had offended him in the past. When the critic Pogodin's wife died and the man was frantic with grief, this is what Gogol wrote him:

  "Jesus Christ will help you to become a gentleman, which you are neither by education or inclination—she is speaking through me."—a letter absolutely unique in the correspondence of compassion. Aksakov was one of the few people who decided at last to let Gogol know his reaction to certain admonishments. "Dear Friend," he wrote, "I never doubt the sincerity of your beliefs or your good will in respect to your friends; but I frankly confess being annoyed by the form your beliefs take. Even more—they frighten me. I am 53 years old. I read Thomas à Kempis before you were born. I am as far from condemning the beliefs of others as I am from accepting them—whereas you come and tell me as if I were a schoolboy—and without having the vaguest notion of what my own ideas are—to read the Imitation —and moreover, to do so at certain fixed hours after my morning coffee, a chapter a day, like a lesson. . . . This is both ridiculous and aggravating. ..."

  But Gogol persisted in his newly found genre. He maintained that whatever he said or did was inspired by the same spirit that would presently disclose its mysterious essence in the second and third volumes of Dead Souls. He also maintained that the volume of Selected Passages was meant as a test, as a means of putting the reader into a suitable frame of mind for the reception of the sequel to Dead Souls. One is forced to assume that he utterly failed to realize the exact nature of the stepping stone he was so kindly providing.

  The main body of the Passages consists of Gogol's advice to Russian landowners, provincial officials and, generally, Christians. County squires are regarded as the agents of God, hard working agents holding shares in paradise and getting more or less substantial commissions in earthly currency. "Gather all your mouzhiks and tell them that you make them labor because this is what God intended them to do—not at all because you need money for your pleasures; and at this point take out a banknote and in visual proof of your words burn it before their eyes. ..." The image is pleasing; the squire standing on his porch and demonstrating a crisp, delicately tinted banknote with the deliberate gestures of a professional magician; a Bible is prepared on an innocent-looking table; a boy holds a lighted candle; the audience of bearded peasants gapes in respectful suspense; there is a murmur of awe as the banknote turns into a butterfly of fire; the conjuror lightly and briskly rubs his hands—just the inside of the fingers; then after some patter he opens the Bible and lo, Phoenix-like, the treasure is there.

  The censor rather generously left out this passage in the first edition as implying a certain disrespect for the Government by the wanton destruction of state money—much in the same way as the worthies in The Government Inspector condemned the breaking of state property (namely chairs) at the hands of violent professors of ancient history. One is tempted to continue this simile and say that in a sense Gogol in those Selected Passages seemed to be impersonating one of his own delightfully grotesque characters. No schools, no books, just you and the village priest—this is the educational system he suggests to the squire. "The peasant must not even know that there exist other books besides the Bible." "Take the village priest with you everywhere .... Make him your estate manager." Samples of robust curses to be employed whenever a lazy serf is to be pricked to the quick are supplied in another astounding passage. There are also some grand bursts of irrelevant rhetoric — and a vicious thrust at the unlucky Pogodin. We find such things as "every man has become a rotten rag" or "compatriots, I am frightened"—the "compatriots" ("saw-are-tea-chesstven-nikee") pronounced with the intonation of "comrades" or "brethren"—only more so.

  The book provoked a tremendous row. Public opinion in Russia was essentially democratic—and, incidentally, deeply admired America. No Tsar could break this backbone (it was snapped only much later by the Soviet regime). There were several schools of civic thought in the middle of the last century; and though the most radical one was to degenerate later into the atrocious dullness of Populism, Marxism, Internationalism and what not (then to spin on and complete its inevitable circle with State Serfdom and Reactionary Nationalism), there can be no doubt whatever that in Gogol's time the

  "Westerners" formed a cultural power vastly exceeding in scope and quality anything that reactionary fogeys could think up. Thus it would not be quite fair to view the critic Belinski, for instance, as merely a forerunner (which phylogenetically he of course was) of those writers of the 1860s and 1870s who virulently enforced the supremacy of civic values over artistic ones; what they meant by "artistic" is another question: Chernyshevski or Pisarev would solemnly accumulate reasons to 37

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  prove that writing textbooks for the people was more important than painting "marble pillars and nymphs"—which they thought was "pure art." Incidentally this outdated method of bringing all esthetic possibilities to the level of one's own little conceptions and capacités in the water color line when criticizing "art for art" from a national, political or generally philistine point of view, is very amusing in the argumentation of some modern American critics. Whatever his naive shortcomings as an appraiser of artistic values, Belinski had as a citizen and as a thinker that wonderful instinct for truth and freedom which only party politics can destroy—and party politics were still in their infancy. At the time his cup still contained a pure liquid; with the help of Dobrolyubov and Pisarev and Mikhaylovski it was doomed to turn into a breeding fluid for most sinister germs. On the other hand Gogol was obviously stuck in the mud and had mistaken the oily glaze on a filthy puddle for a mystic rainbow of sorts. Belinski's famous letter, ripping up as it does the Selected Passages ("this inflated and sluttish hullaballoo of words and phrases") is a noble document. It contained too a spirited attack on Tsardom so that distribution of copies of the "Belinski letter" soon became punishable by Hard Labor in Siberia. Gogol, it seems, was mainly upset by Belinski's hints at his fawning upon aristocrats for the sake of financial assistance. Belinski,
of course, belonged to the "poor and proud" school; Gogol as a Christian condemned "pride."

  In spite of the torrents of abuse, complaints and sarcasm that flooded his book from most quarters, Gogol kept a rather brave countenance. Although admitting that the book had been written "in a morbid and constrained state of mind" and that "inexperience in the art of such writing had, with the Devil's help, transformed the humility I actually felt into an arrogant display of self-sufficiency" (or, as he puts it elsewhere, "I let myself go like a regular Khlestakov"), he maintained with the solemnity of a staunch martyr that his book was necessary, and this for three reasons: it had made people show him what he was; it had shown him and themselves what they were; and it had cleansed the general atmosphere as efficiently as a thunderstorm. This was about equal to saying that he had done what he had intended to do: prepare public opinion for the reception of the second part of Dead Souls.

  During his long years abroad and hectic visits to Russia Gogol kept jotting down on scraps of paper (in his carriage, at some inn, in a friend's house, anywhere) odds and ends relating to the supreme masterpiece. At times he would have quite a series of chapters which he would read to his most intimate friends in great secret; at others he would have nothing; sometimes a friend would be copying pages and pages of it and sometimes Gogol insisted that not a word had been penned yet—everything was in his brain. Apparently there were several minor holocausts preceding the main one just before his death.

  At a certain point of his tragic efforts he did something which, in view of his physical frailty, was rather in the nature of a feat: he journeyed to Jerusalem with the object of obtaining what he needed for the writing of his book —divine advice, strength and creative fancy—much in the same fashion as a sterile woman might beg the Virgin for a child in the painted darkness of a medieval church. For several years, however, he kept postponing this pilgrimage: his spirit, he said, was not ready; God did not wish it yet; "mark the obstacles he puts in my way"; a certain state of mind (vaguely resembling the Catholic "grace") had to come into being so as to ensure a maximum probability of success in his (absolutely pagan) enterprise; moreover, he needed a reliable traveling companion who would not be a bore; would be silent or talkative at moments exactly synchronizing with the pilgrim's prismatic mood; and who, when required, would tuck in the traveling rug with a soothing hand. When at last in January, 1848, he launched upon his hazardous enterprise, there was just as little reason for its not turning into a dismal flop as there ever had been.

  A sweet old lady, Nadezhda Nikolayevna Sheremetev, one of Gogol's truest and dullest correspondents, with whom he had exchanged many a prayer for the welfare of his soul saw him to the town barrier beyond Moscow. Gogol's papers were probably in perfect order but somehow or other he disliked the idea of their being examined, and the holy pilgrimage began with one of those morbid mystifications which he was wont to practice on policemen. Unfortunately, it involved the old lady too. At the barrier she embraced the pilgrim, broke into tears and made the sign of the cross over Gogol who responded effusively. At this moment papers were asked for: an official wanted to know who exactly was leaving. "This little old lady," cried Gogol, and rolled away in his carriage, leaving Madame Sheremetev in a very awkward position.

  To his mother he sent a special prayer to be read in church by the local priest. In this prayer he begged the Lord to save him from robbers in the East and to spare him seasickness during the crossing. The Lord ignored the second request: between 38

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  Naples and Malta, on the capricious ship "Capri," Gogol vomited so horribly that "the passengers marveled greatly." The rest of the pilgrimage was singularly dim so that had there not been some official proof of its actual occurrence one might easily suppose that he invented the whole journey as he had formerly invented an excursion to Spain. When for years on end you have been telling people that you are going to do something and when you are sick of not being able to make up your mind, it saves a good deal of trouble to have them believe one fine day that you have done it already—and what a relief to be able to drop the matter.

  "What can my dreamlike impressions convey to you? I saw the Holy Land through the mist of a dream. " (From a letter to Zhukovski). We have a glimpse of him quarreling in the desert with Bazsili, his traveling companion. Somewhere in Samaria he plucked an asphodel, somewhere in Galilee a poppy (having a vague inclination for botany as Rousseau had). It rained at Nazareth, and he sought shelter, and was stranded there for a couple of hours "hardly realizing that I was in Nazareth as I sat there" (on a bench under which a hen had taken refuge) "just as I would have been sitting at some stage-coach station somewhere in Russia." The sanctuaries he visited failed to fuse with their mystic reality in his soul. In result, the Holy Land did as little for his soul (and his book) as German sanatoriums had done for his body.

  During the last ten years of his life, Gogol kept stubbornly brooding over the sequel to Dead Souls. He had lost the magic capacity of creating life out of nothing; his imagination needed some ready material to work upon for he still had the strength of repeating himself; although unable to produce a brand new world as he had done in the first part, he thought he could use the same texture and recombine its designs in another fashion, namely: in conformity with a definite purpose which had been absent from the first part, but which was now supposed not only to provide a new driving force, but also to endow the first part with a retrospective meaning.

  Apart from the special character of Gogol's case, the general delusion into which he had lapsed was of course disastrous. A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as "what is art?" and "what is an artist's duty?" Gogol decided that the purpose of literary art was to cure ailing souls by producing in them a sense of harmony and peace. The treatment was also to include a strong dose of didactic medicine. He proposed to portray national defects and national virtues in such a manner as to help readers to persever in the latter and rid themselves of the former. At the beginning of his work on the sequel his intention was to make his characters not "wholly virtuous," but "more important" than those of Part One. To use the pretty slang of publishers and reviewers he wished to invest them with more "human appeal." Writing novels were merely a sinful game if the author's "sympathetic attitude" towards some of his characters and a "critical attitude" towards others, was not disclosed with perfect clarity. So clearly, in fact, that even the humblest reader (who likes books in dialogue form with a minimum of "descriptions"—because conversations are "life") would know whose side to take. What Gogol promised to give the reader —or rather the readers he imagined—were facts. He would, he said, represent Russians not by the "petty traits" of individual freaks, not by "smug vulgarities and oddities," not through the sacrilegious medium of a lone artist's private vision, but in such a manner that "the Russian would appear in the fullness of his national nature, in all the rich variety of the inner forces contained in him." In other words the "dead souls" would become "live souls."

  It is evident that what Gogol (or any other writer having similar unfortunate intentions) is saying here can be reduced to much simpler terms "I have imagined one kind of world in my first part, but now I am going to imagine another kind which will conform better to what I imagine are the concepts of Right and Wrong more or less consciously shared by my imaginary readers." Success in such cases (with popular magazine novelists, etc.) is directly dependent on how closely the author's vision of "readers" corresponds to the traditional, i.e. imaginary, notions that readers have of their own selves, notions carefully bred and sustained by a regular supply of mental chewing gum provided by the corresponding publishers.

  But Gogol's position was of course not so simple, first because what he proposed to write was to be on the lines of a religious revelation, and second, because the imaginary reader was supposed not merely to enjoy sundry details of the revelation but to be morally helped, improved or even totally regenerated by the g
eneral effect of the book. The main difficulty lay in having to combine the material of the first part, which from a philistine's viewpoint dealt with "oddities"

  (but which Gogol had to use since he could no longer create a new texture), with the kind of solemn sermon, staggering samples of which he had given in the Selected Passages. Although his first intention was to have his characters not "wholly virtuous" but "important" in the sense of their fully representing a rich mixture of Russian passions, moods and ideals, he gradually discovered that these "important" characters coming from under his pen were being adulterated by the 39

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  inevitable oddities that they borrowed from their natural medium and from their inner affinity with the nightmare squires of the initial set. Consequently the only way out was to have another alien group of characters which would be quite obviously and quite narrowly "good" because any attempt at rich characterization in their case would be bound to lead to the same weird forms which the not "wholly virtuous" ones kept assuming owing to their unfortunate ancestry.