Worlds Apart

by Alexander Levitsky

  But if we can find in this Petersburg Tale genesis for all kinds of transformations in future works, nothing should prevent us from enjoying the story’s own metamorphoses. There are plenty, starting from the history of its making. Originally planned as a dream from which the protagonist awakes at the end of the story, its final format shapes an estranged and mixed-up reality—a series of waking dreams—in which Petersburg barbers may just find noses in their daily bread, noses themselves may stroll as civil councilors, ride in carriages, or piously pray in churches, and runaway house serfs may in fact be runaway poodles. In Gogol’s imagination the nose must be understood as precisely that arabesque protrusion from the plane of the human face, which allows not only for his best characterization, but also for contact between the inner self and its surroundings. The central enigma of the story is paraded for the reader right from the beginning at the mention of the barbershop’s signboard, “where a gentleman is depicted with his cheeks covered with soapsuds,” to which a naturally arising question—as to whether his nose is or is not seen from the midst of the soapsuds—is never answered. Instead the author quotes an inscription on the signboard “also lets blood,” but again the reader never discovers to his full satisfaction why this is mentioned. Does it stand for the then common practice of applying leeches to reduce blood-pressure, or does it threaten the true horror of cutting a nose from human face, or does it—as the bread-flinging reference—function as yet another sacrilegious symbol? We may never know, yet it is clear that Gogol, who began with horror stories against a rural backdrop, found Petersburg to be just as viable a setting for weaving estranged fantastic scapes. Due to his technique of arabesque modeling, these new works could easily transcend both the bathos and pathos of his earlier creations and achieve universal significance in their fantasy-making.

  Gogol holds a unique place in Russian fiction—indeed, the period from about 1835 to his death in 1852 is commonly referred to as the age of Gogol—and it is for this reason that we devote a full section of this volume to his works.

  Vyi

  [ABRIDGED]

  Vyi is a collosal creation of the popular imagination. It is the name among the Little Russians for the chief of the gnomes, whose eylids droop down to the earth. The whole story is folklore. I was unwilling to change it, and tell it in the simple words in which I heard it. (N. GOGOL)

  As soon as the rather musical seminary bell which hung at the gate of the Bratskii Monastery rang out every morning in Kiev, schoolboys and students hurried thither in crowds from all parts of the town. Students of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and theology trudged to their class-rooms with exercise-books under their arms. The grammarians were quite small boys; they shoved each other as they went along and quarrelled in shrill altos; almost all wore muddy or tattered clothes, and their pockets were full of all manner of rubbish, such as knucklebones, whistles made of feathers, or a half-eaten pie, sometimes even little sparrows, one of whom suddenly chirruping at an exceptionally quiet moment in the class-room would cost its owner some resounding whacks on both hands and sometimes a thrashing. The rhetoricians walked with more dignity; their clothes were often quite free from holes; on the other hand, their countenances almost all bore some decoration, after the style of a figure of rhetoric: either one eye had sunk right under the forehead, or there was a monstrous swelling in place of a lip, or some other disfigurement. They talked and swore among themselves in tenor voices. The philosophers conversed an octave lower in the scale; they had nothing in their pockets but strong, cheap tobacco. They laid in no stores of any sort, but ate on the spot anything they came across; they smelt of pipes and horilka to such a distance that a passing workman would sometimes stop a long way off and sniff the air like a setter dog.

  As a rule the market was just beginning to stir at that hour, and the workmen with bread-rings, rolls, melon seeds, and poppy cakes would tug at the skirts of those whose coats were of fine cloth or some cotton material.

  “This way, young gentleman, this way!” they kept saying from all sides, “here are bread-rings, poppy cakes, twists, tasty white roles; they are really good! Made with honey! I baked them myself.”

  Another woman, lifting up a sort of long twist made of dough, would cry, “Here’s a bread stick! Buy my bread stick, young gentleman!”—“Don’t buy anything off her; see what a horrid woman she is, her nose is nasty and her hands are dirty …”

  But the women were afraid to worry the philosophers and the theologians, for they were fond of taking things to taste and always a good handful.

  On reaching the seminary, the crowd dispersed to their various classes, which were held in low-pitched but fairly large rooms, with little windows, wide doorways, and dirty benches. The class-room was at once filled with all sorts of buzzing sounds: the “auditors” heard their pupils repeat their lessons; the shrill alto of a grammarian rang out, and the window-panes responded with almost the same note; in a corner a rhetorician, whose stature and thick lips should have belonged at least to a student of philosophy, was droning something in a bass voice, and all that could be heard at a distance was, “Boo, boo, boo …” The “auditors,” as they heard the lesson, kept glancing with one eye under the bench, where a roll or a cheese cake of some pumpkin seed were peeping out of a scholar’s pocket.

  When the learned crowd managed to arrive a little too early, or when they knew that the professors would be later than usual, then by general consent they got up a fight, and everyone had to take part in it, even the monitors whose duty it was to maintain discipline and look after the morals of all the students. Two theologians usually settled the arrangements for the battle: whether each class was to defend itself individually, or whether all were to be divided into two parties, the bursars and the seminarists. In any case the grammarians launched the attack, and as soon as the rhetoricians entered the fray, they ran away and stood at points of vantage to watch the contest. Then the devotees of philosophy, with long black moustaches, joined in, and finally those of theology, very thick in the neck and attired in enormous trousers, took part. It commonly ended in theology beating all the rest, and the philosophers, rubbing their ribs, were forced into the classroom and sat down on the benches to rest. The professor, who had himself at one time taken part in such battles, could, on entering the class, see in a minute from the flushed faces of his audience that the battle had been a good one, and while he was caning rhetorics on the fingers, in another classroom another professor would be smacking philosophy’s hands with a wooden bat. The theologians were dealt with in quite a different way: they received, to use the expression of a professor of theology, “a peck of peas a piece,” in other words, a liberal drubbing with short leather thongs.

  On holidays and ceremonial occasions the bursars and seminarists went from house to house as mummers. Sometimes they acted a play, and then the most distinguished figure was always some theologian, almost as tall as the belfry of Kiev, who took the part of Herodias of Potiphar’s wife. They received in payment a piece of linen, or a sack of millet, of half a boiled goose, or something of the sort. All this crowd of students—the seminarists as well as the bursars, with whom they maintain an hereditary feud—were exceedingly badly off for means of subsistence, and at the same time had extraordinary appetites, so that to reckon how many dumplings each of them tucked away at supper would be utterly impossible, and therefore the voluntary offerings of prosperous citizens could not be sufficient for them. Then the “senate” of the philosophers and theologians dispatched the grammarians and rhetoricians, under the supervision of a philosopher (and sometimes took part in the raid themselves), with sacks on their shoulders to plunder the kitchen gardens—and pumpkin porridge was made in the bursars’ quarters. The members of the “senate” ate such masses of melons that next day their “auditors” heard two lessons from them instead of one, one coming from their lips, another muttering in their stomachs. Both the bursars and the seminarists wore long garmets resembling frock-coats, “prolonged to the utmost
limit,” a technical expression signifying below their heels.

  The most important event for the seminarists was the coming of the vacation; it began in June, when they usually dispersed to their homes. Then the whole highroad was dotted with philosophers, grammarians and theologians. Those who had nowhere to go went to stay with some comrade. The philosophers and theologians took a situation, that is, undertook the tuition of the children of prosperous families, and received in payment a pair of new boots or sometimes even a coat. The whole crowd trailed along together like a gipsy encampment, boiled their porridge, and slept in the fields. Everyone hauled along a sack in which he had a shirt and a pair of leg-wrappers. The theologians were particular thrifty and precise: to avoid wearing out their boots, they took them off, hung them on sticks and carried them on their shoulders, especially if the road was muddy; then, tucking their trousers up above their knees, they splashed fearlessly through the puddles. When they saw a village they turned off the high road and going up to any house which seemed a little better looking than the rest, stood in a row before the windows and began singing a chant at the top of their voices. The master of the house, some old Cossack villager, would listen to them for a long time, his head propped on his hands, then he would sob bitterly and say, turning to his wife: “Wife! What the scholars are singing must be very deep; bring them fat bacon and anything else that we have.” And a whole bowl of dumplings was emptied into the sack, a good-sized piece of bacon, several flat loaves, and sometimes of trussed hen would go into it too. Fortified with such stores, the grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers and theologians went on their way again. Their numbers lessened, however, the farther they went. Almost all wandered off towards their homes, and only those were left whose parental abodes were farther away.

  Once, at the time of such a migration, three students turned off the high road in order to replenish their store of provisions at the first homestead they could find, for their sacks had long been empty. They were the theologian, Khaliava; the philosopher, Khoma Brut; and the rhetorician, Tiberii Gorobets.

  The theologian was a well-grown, broad-shouldered fellow; he had an extremely odd habit—anything that lay within his reach he invariably stole. In other circumstances, he was of an excessively gloomy temper, and when he was drunk he used to hide in the tall weeds, and the seminarists had a lot of trouble to find him there.

  The philosopher, Khoma Brut, was of a cheerful disposition, he was very fond of lying on his back and smoking a pipe; when he was drinking he always engaged musicians and danced the trepak. He often had a taste of the “peck of peas,” but took it with perfect philosophical indifference, saying that there is no escaping from the inevitable. The rhetorician, Tiberii Gorobets, had not yet the right to wear a moustache, to drink horilka, and to smoke a pipe. He only wore a forelock round his ear, and so his character was as yet hardly formed; but, judging from the big bumps on the forehead, with which he often appeared in class, it might be presumed that he would make a good fighter. The theologian, Khaliava, and the philosopher, Khoma, often pulled him by the forelock as a sign of their favour, and employed him as their messenger.

  It was evening when they turned off the high road; the sun had only just set and the warmth of the day still lingered in the air. The theologian and the philosopher walked along in silence smoking their pipes; the rhetorician, Tiberii Gorobets, kept knocking off the heads of the wayside thistles with his stick. The road weaved in between the scattered groups of oak- and nut-trees standing here and there in the meadows. Sloping uplands and little hills, green and round as cupolas, were interspersed here and there about the plain. The cornfields of ripening wheat, which came into view in two places, were the evidence that they were nearing some village. More than an hour passed, however, since they had seen the cornfields, yet there were no dwellings in sight. The sky was now completely wrapped in darkness, and only in the west there was a pale streak left of the glow of sunset.

  “What the devil does it mean?” said the philosopher, Khoma Brut. “It looked as though there must be a village in a minute.”

  The theologian did not speak, he gazed at the surrounding country, then put his pipe back in his mouth, and they continued on their way.

  “Upon my soul!” the philosopher said, stopping again, “not a devil’s fist to be seen.”

  “Maybe some village will turn up farther on,” said the theologian, not removing his pipe.

  But meantime night had come on, and a rather dark night. Small clouds increased the gloom, and by every token they could expect neither stars nor moon. The students noticed that they had lost their way and for a long time had been walking off the road.

  The philosopher, after feeling the ground about him with his feet in all directions, said at last, abruptly, “I say, where’s the road?”

  The theologian did not speak for a while, then, after pondering, he brought out, “Yes, it is a dark night.”

  The rhetorician walked off to one side and tried on his hands and knees to grope for the road, but his hands came upon nothing but foxes’ holes. On all sides of them there was the steppe, which, it seemed, no one had ever crossed.

  The travellers made another effort to press on a little, but there was the same wilderness in all direction. The philosopher tried shouting, but his voice seemed completely lost on the steppe, and met with no reply. All they heard was, a little afterwards, a faint moaning like the howl of a wolf.

  “I say, what’s to be done?” said the philosopher.

  “Why, halt and sleep in the open!” said the theologian, and he felt in his pocket for flint and tinder to light his pipe again. But the philosopher could not agree to this: it was always his habit at night to put away a quarter-loaf of bread and four pounds of fat bacon, and he was conscious on this occasion of an insufferable sense of loneliness in his stomach. Besides, in spite of his cheerful temper, the philosopher was rather afraid of wolves.

  “No, Khaliava, we can’t,” he said. “What, stretch out and lie down like a dog, without a bite or a sup of anything? Let’s make another try for it; maybe we shall stumble on some dwelling-place and get at least a drink of horilka for supper.”

  At the word “horilka” the theologian spat to one side and brought out, “Well, of course, it’s no use staying in the open.”

  The students pushed on, and to their intense delight soon caught the sound of barking in the distance. After listening which direction it came from, they walked on more boldly and a little later saw a light.

  “A farm! It really is a farm!” said the philosopher.

  He was not mistaken in his supposition; in a little while they actually saw a little homestead consisting of only two cottages looking into the same farmyard. There was a light in the windows; a dozen plum-trees stood up by the fence. Looking through the cracks in the paling-gate the students saw a yard filled with carriers’ waggons. Here and there the stars peeped out in the sky.

  “Look, mates, don’t let’s be put off! We must get a night’s lodging somehow!”

  The three learned gentleman banged on the gates with one accord and shouted, “Open up!”

  The door of one of the cottages creaked, and a minute later they saw before them an old woman in a sheepskin.

  “Who is there?” she cried, with a hollow cough.

  “Give us a night’s lodging, Granny; we have lost our way; a night in the open is as bad as a hungry belly.”

  “What manner of folks may you be?”

  “We’re harmless folks: Khaliava, a theologian; Brut, a philosopher; and Gorobets, a rhetorician.”

  “I can’t,” grumbled the old woman. “The yard is crowded with folk and every corner in the cottage is full. Where am I to put you? And such great hulking fellows, too! Why, my cottage will fall to pieces if I put such fellows in it. I know these philosophers and theologians; if one began taking in these drunken fellows, there’d soon be no home left. Be off, be off! There’s no place for you here!”

  “Have pity on us, Granny!
How can you let Christian souls perish for no rhyme or reason? Put us where you please; and if we do aught amiss of anything else, may our arms be withered, and God only knows what befall us—so there!”

  The old woman seemed somewhat softened. “Very well.” she said as though reconsidering, “I’ll ley you in, but I’ll put you up all in different places, for my mind won’t be at rest if you are all together.”

  “That’s as you please; we’ll make no objection,” answered the students.