The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

114 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Petersburg tales by Gogol and Dostoevsky, perhaps even a little below. But a different dynamic operates in the “Gogol line.” A larger role is played by laughter – an immense resource that the “Pushkinian” writers exploit only slightly, for brief stretches, and in a decorous, responsible manner quite foreign to the Gogol school. But also, for Gogol, a fundamentally different shape governs the fictional plot.

Public honor pursued through the dueling code requires that parties take themselves with high seriousness, stay put, and fire according to the rules. Having done so, a person “saves face.” Further explanations or public confessions are inappropriate. Gogol prefers to work in more evasive, private realms. His heroes do not stay put. They move through spaces, quickly and linearly. They don’t come home – or they don’t have identifiable homes, a possibility that is concretely realized by Dostoevsky when he houses his heroes in crowded apartments that are in effect corridors, breeding places for “accidental families.” (Tolstoy once remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters all behave as if they lived at a train station.) When Gogol’s heroes slow down, then the trouble starts, and to save themselves they must burst out. A happy ending, for Gogol, is an escape. If Pushkin is Russia’s poet of honor, then Gogol is the unmatched master of evasion and embarrassment.

Gogol and embarrassment (its linearity, lopsidedness, evasiveness)

By temperament and upbringing, Pushkin was an aristocrat, thoroughly at home in European culture. Rank, honor, and pedigree were for him second nature. Nikolai Gogol, in contrast, was a provincial, the son of a minor landowner raisedin Ukraine. Hisgraduation certificatefrompublic school conferred upon him the lowest rank, ‘collegiate registrar’ (civilian rank Fourteen). When Gogol moved to Petersburg at age nineteen, nothing in the imperial capital’s estranged, glittering, regimented social system could have struck him as natural or organic. For Gogol – a brilliant stylizer of Ukrainian folk tales, which he filled with demons, witches, and gothic villains – Petersburg proved to be marvelous creative material. His stories quickly became foundational for the Petersburg Myth.

Before entering that urban landscape, however, with its caricatures in uniform and detachable human parts, we will consider one “provincial” anecdote (Gogol’s shortest story, as it happens), which he intended for an almanac edited by Pushkin in 1835. It introduces in miniature the dynamics of a Gogolian narrative, psychological as well as spatial. This little stretch of text contains no