Nikolai Gogol
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Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (Russian: Никола́й Васи́льевич Го́голь) (March 31, 1809 - March 4, 1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer. Although many of his works were influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing, he wrote in Russian and his works belong to the tradition of Russian literature. Perhaps his best known work is Dead Souls, seen by many as the first "modern" Russian novel.
Biography
Gogol was born in Sorochintsi of Poltava Guberniya (now Ukraine) to the family of Ukrainian (or rather Ruthenian) small-time nobility (dvoryanstvo). Some of his ancestors associated themselves with Polish Szlachta (probably not by ethnicity but culturally, due to the continued polonization of Ruthenian upper class) and his grand-father Afanasiy Gogol wrote in census papers that "his ancestors, of the family-name Gogol, are of the Polish nation". However, his great-grandfather, Jan Gogol, after studying in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, a deeply Ukrainian, or Ruthenian, and Orthodox Christian educational institution, moved to the Muscovy leaning Left-bank Ukraine (Malorossia) and settled in Poltava region, originating the Gogol-Janovsky family line. Gogol himself did not use the second part of his name considering it an "artificial Polish addition". Gogol's father died when the boy was 15 years old. The deep religiosity of his mother and the time he spent in the surroundings of local small-town nobility and everyday village lifelikely influenced Gogol's world view.
He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1828. In 1831, he met Aleksandr Pushkin, who supported him as a writer and became his friend, later pusblishing some of Gogol's stories in his journal, The Contemporary. Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka River(1831-2), his first collection of short stories was well received. He later taught history at Saint Petersburg University from 1834 to 1835. He went on to write a number of short stories set in Saint Petersburg, including "Nevsky Prospekt", the Diary of a Madman, "The Overcoat", and "The Nose" (which was later turned into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich). His farce, the uproariously funny play The Inspector General, was first produced in 1836. Its savage satire of Russian bureaucratic life, which it shares with much of his other work, caused some controversy, leading Gogol to spend the next 12 years abroad, primarily in Rome.
Dead Souls and The Overcoat
It was in this period that he wrote Dead Souls. The first part, and the only part to survice intact, was published in 1842. same year he published his great short story, The Overcoat. Like The Inspector General they continue Gogol's satiric treatment of Russian officialdom. The Overcoat tells the story of a simple copy clerk, Akaky Akakevich Bashmachkin. (Gogol's name derivations give a significant insight into his comic mind. Bashmachkin is derived from the word for shoe. Of course, the story is about not a shoe, but a coat. The choice of name is based not on any significance of shoes in the story, but on the feeling that its meaning and its sound evokes.) Akaky lives to copy. When his tailor informs him that his threadbare overcoat cannot be patched any further, it sets his life into turmoil. He must face the daunting task of replacing it with a new overcoat, which he cannot afford. But Akaky faces up to his challenge, finding ways to economize his already bleak existence in order to buy a new overcoat. After a long period of anticipation, finally the joyous day arrives. He picks up his new coat and it transforms his life. Not only does it inject in him a new sense of pride, but even his co-workers, who had mercilessly ridiculed him previously, began to treat him with new found respect. Sadly, on the way home from a party given in honor of his new coat, he is beset by robbers who steal his new prized possession. He goes to visit a "very important person" to report the theft but is verbally abused by him for his pains. Devastated, he becomes ill and dies. But that is not the end of the story. Reports begin to circulate that a ghost is haunting people on the streets and stealing their overcoats.
This story was hailed by Russian literary and social critic, Visarrion Belinsky, as an example of the dehumanization under the corrupt Russian state. The oft repeat claim that "we have all come out of Gogol's Overcoat" expresses the importance of this work as a precursor to the development of realism in later Russian prose writers. However, Gogol's story, like all of his work, is equal parts grotesque, fantastic, satire and social criticism.
Dead Souls is another example of the same combination of elements. Chichikov uses a loophole in the Russian tax system to hatch a plan to make himself wealthy. Landowners were taxed on their land and possessions, which included how many serfs, or souls, they owned. The number of serfs owned was determined by census, so landowners would continue to be taxed on the serfs, even after they had died. Chichikov reasoned that he could buy these "dead souls" from landowners at bargain prices, then as a landowner with a large number of souls for collateral, he could borrow a hefty sum of money and live lavishly. The novel is a kind of picaresque which recounts Chichikov's travels and encounters with various landowners in his attempt to buy "dead souls." On his journey, the landowners that he meets are each more ridiculous than the next. These are stock characters who each embody a single characteristic, like the stupid and superstitious Korobochka and the miserly Plyushkin. They serve as perfect comic foils for Chichikov. Driven by their own vices and greed, they participate in his grotesque and wickedly funny plan. The title of the novel serves not only as a description of a commodity that is bought and sold in the action of the novel, but also as an ironic commentary on the moral state of the society depicted. Gogol's social commentary is all the more effective due to his comic genius and verbal artistry, which is the real hero of all of Gogol's great works.
Gogol began work on a second part of the novel, in which Chichikov was to undergo a moral and spiritual regeneration. Both attempts failed, with Gogol burning the manuscript each time. Only a small portion escaped the fire. It is generally considered inferior to the first. In 1847 Gogol published Selected Passages from My Correspondence with Friends. This collection of essays seemed to many to run counter to the thrust of his literary works, which had been so critical of Russian society's foibles. He endorsed the institutions of Russian society, including serfdom and argued that individual moral and particually religious development was needed. This view met with predictable criticism from his supporters who had championed his literary work, and prompted Belinsky to write his famous "Letter to Gogol." Belinsky condemned this book as a betrayal of the cause of social progress. In 1848, after the fallout from his book, Gogol left the country again, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Even before his pilgrimage Gogol decided that before he could continue his work on the novel and bring about the "spiritual regeneration of a crook like Chichikov", he had to undergo a spiritual regeneration himself. He imposed upon himself a strict regime of prayer and fasting, but it did not help him with his writing. At the end of June 1845 in a state of nervous collapse, he burnt all he had written of the second volume of Dead Souls. For the next seven years he resumed his work on the novel. After his return, he fell under the influence of the priest, Father Matthew Konstantinovskii, who regarded his literary work as an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Konstantinovskii wanted Gogol to give up his literary career and "atone for his sin of writing the first volume by entering a monastery". Following a tremendous inner conflict, Gogol decided to carry out Father Konstantinovskii's wishes and burnt the complete second part of his novel on the night of February 24, 1852. He soon after took to his bed, refused all food, and died in great pain nine days later, on March 5, 1852. Some fragments of the work survived and have been published.
He was buried at the Donskoy Monastery, close to his fellow Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1931, when Moscow authorities decided to demolish the monastery, his remains were transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery. His body was discovered lying face down, which gave rise to the story that Gogol had been buried alive. One of Soviet critics even cut a part of his jacket to use as a binding for his copy of the Dead Souls. A piece of rock which used to stand on his grave at the Donskoy was reused for the tomb of Gogol's admirer Mikhail Bulgakov.
Interpretation
Gogol's literary life and works was caught up in the struggle between the Westernizer and Slavophile elements in Russian culture. Belinsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky and other literary critics viewed his stories as social criticism. Due to the reactionary nature of the regime, direct social criticism was not permitted, so social critics like Belinsky turned to literary criticism to make their points. Belinsky's assessment of Gogol's stories had been based on his own reformist zeal, and not that of their author.
Living in post-Napoleonic Russia, with liberal discontent against Czarist rule, reformers interpreted Gogol stories as validation. This is because some of Gogol's stories satirized situations particular to Russian society. Indeed, Gogol was motivated as a reformer in his own mind, but not necessarily as defined by the liberals of the time. Toward the end of his life, liberals saw him as a religious fanatic, strangely reactionary, and increasingly pathetic.
An urge to reform Russia impelled Dead Souls; but whether moral or political seems unclear at first. Part one of that book shows the errors of the protagonist, part two shows the corrections. Arguably, Gogol is more successful showing the errors than the corrections, perhaps because errors and immorality are more fun and interesting to write about, than to preach and show good by example.
Gogol's desire for the moral reformation of Russia became increasingly loud and non-liberal, leading to his publication of selected fanatical letters. His former liberal admirers looked upon this publication with horror and dismay. It may be the contradictions and failures of Gogol's embodiment of both "Westernizer" and "Slavophile" urges that lead him to burn his draft of part two of Dead Souls, and for his health to fatally decline.
Gogol wrote in the literary tradition of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Laurence Sterne, often involving elements of the fantastic and grotesque. In addition, Gogol's works are often outrageously funny. The mix of humor, social realism, the fantastic, and unusual prose forms are what readers love about his work.
Gogol wrote in a time of political censorship. The use of the fantastic is, like Aesophic storytelling, one way to circumvent the censor, as placing the supernatural into a realistic setting softens anything that offends the regime by making it also seem "not real". Some of the best Soviet writers also used the fantastic for similar reasons.
Gogol had a huge and enduring impact on Russian literature (Fyodor Dostoevsky famously claimed that 'we all [future generations of Russian novelists]came out from under his Overcoat'). In the 1920s, a group of Russian Writers consciously built on this thread, created the Seripian Brethren, naming the group after a character in a Hoffmann story. Writers as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Bulgakov and Abram Tertz (Siniavsky) also consciously followed this tradition.
Partial list of works
- A May Evening
- Arabesques
- Dead Souls
- Diary of a Madman (novel)
- Hanz Küchelgarten
- Leaving the Theater
- How Two Ivans Quarrelled
- The Inspector General
- Meditations on the Divine Liturgy
- My Old Sweetheart
- Nevsky Prospect
- The Overcoat (short story)
- Sorotchinzy Fair
- St. John's Eve (short story), a source for Night on Bald Mountain
- Taras Bulba
- The Calash
- The Mantle (short story)
- The Mysterious Portrait
- The Nose
- The Carriage
- The Portrait (short story)
- Village Evenings near Dikanka and Morgorod
External links
- Works by Nikolai Gogol. Project Gutenberg
- Full collection of Nikolai Gogol works
- Some works by Nikolai Gogol in the original Russian
- Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Gogol and his work
- Nikolai Gogol's entry in the encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer culture
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Introduction by David Magarshack from the Penguin Classics English translation of Dead Souls
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