The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The clerk Akaky is meek. Other pathetic clerks in Gogol’s Petersburg are ambitious. One such is the hero ofDiary of a Madman, Poprishchin, pen-pusher and quill-sharpener. We watch him go out of his mind, entry by entry. Smitten with his boss’s daughter, he gets access to her by purloining letters written by her dog. “Perhaps” - he writes in his diary a few days before declaring himself to be the King of Spain - “I’m really a count or a general, and am merely imagining I’m a titular councilor? Perhaps I really don’t know who I am at all?” As we shall see in Chapter 6, Dostoevsky begins his career by literally rewriting these poor Gogolian clerks, who become the eyes and ears of his early worldview, growing gradually more self-conscious, shrewd, and cruel.

Like his madman Poprishchin and his con man Chichikov from Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol also did not wish people to know precisely who, or where, he was. He had a dazzling gift for distortion and concealment. A brilliant mimic from early childhood, Gogol could create any role out of the most casual verbal prompt. He falsified personal events in his letters home. He left no diaries, memoirs, wife or close family. Even after he had become Russia’s most famous prose writer, he was infuriated when a friend published a realistic portrait of him. Gogol perceived himself and his work in a messianic light. Until fully shaped, his person and message should shine through to others only darkly, if at all. Gogol abandoned Russia in 1837 and spent most of the rest of his life in Italy, writing and despairing of ever completing his epic Dead Souls.

Perhaps a private, evasive, deceptive psyche like Gogol’s can be most accurately grasped by a creative writer of equivalent genius. Pushkin, with his brilliantly visible public life, is well served by several full-length biographies in English, most recently the fascinating and irreverent account by T. J. Binyon (Pushkin: A Biography, 2002). But arguably the best English-language biography of Gogol is still Vladimir Nabokov’s Nikolai Gogol (1944), a slim volume extremely thin on events. Nabokov begins the story with Gogol’s death in 1852 from malnutrition and gastroenteritis, huge leeches hanging from his nose, after he had burnt, in a frenzy of repentance and on the advice of his Roman Catholic confessor, Parts 2 and 3 of Dead Souls. “Gogol was a strange

118 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

creature,” Nabokov writes. His basic units were not ideasatall but “focal shifts,” abrupt and irrational. “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight . . . but with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent.”22 Respect for rank, good taste, clarity of confrontation, the straight line of honor that permits one to come back home with head held high: this is Pushkin’s familiar landscape. And on the other side, we have Gogol: the sudden crooked “focal shift” of evasion and embarrassment, what Nabokov called “a jerk and a glide,” with the hero darting away out from under our nose.

Pretendership (two authors, two plays, two novels)

As our final juxtaposition of Pushkin and Gogol we will consider, very selectively, four famous works – one novel and one play for each. Our focus for all four is “pretendership” – in Russian, samozvanstvo (literally, “self-naming”): the act of presenting yourself publicly as someone other than who you are. This gesture is relatively straightforward when the pretender in question is clinically mad, as is Poprishchin (protagonist of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman) when he declares himself the King of Spain. Our upcoming examples are more complex. Both of Pushkin’s pretenders are real historical figures in fictionalized garb. What they pretend to is the Russian throne. The two home texts for these adventurers are the drama Boris Godunov (1825), in which a young runaway monk, Grigory Otrepiev, invades Russia claiming to be the Tsarevich Dmitry, youngest son of Ivan the Terrible; and the novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836), in which the Cossack chieftain Emelyan Pugachov claimsto be Peter III, deposed and deceased spouse of Empress Catherine II. Pushkin’s Pugachov, in conversation with thenovel’s hero Grinyov, remembers (from oral legend? from Pushkin’s play?) Otrepiev’s success at toppling the Godunovs and is inspired to imitate it.