The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanticisms 115

fantastic or grotesque episodes of the sort we see in the Ukrainian folk tales or Petersburg stories. It passed unnoticed in the press. But Tolstoy later remarked that he was tempted to call it Gogol’s best work, and Chekhov felt that these few pages were worth 200,000 rubles, so perfectly did they concentrate Gogol’s genius. The anecdote is “The Carriage.”

A cavalry regiment enters a provincial town, largely mud and pigs. The storyteller describes the town with hyperbolic relish. Gogolian digressions, it must be said, are not elegant or elegiac, as in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; they are stuffed full of food (gorged or swilled), crude squawking sounds, the misbehavior of physical matter. A favored device of the storyteller is to fasten his eccentric roving eye on one inanimate thing (in this story, carriages) or one body part (bellies, moustaches) and stealthily, this one item becomes all on the horizon the reader sees. The general gives a banquet. Over cigars a local landowner, Chertokutsky, offers to sell his Excellency a carriage. The landowner invites the general and his officers to lunch the next day for a viewing. But then Chertokutsky stays on at the banquet, begins to play whist, “a mysterious glass full of rum punch appears before him,” he plays and drinks, drinks and plays, “recalls winning a great deal, yet there appeared to be no winnings for him to pick up . . .”.19 At 3 a.m. he stumbles home. His pretty wife doesn’t wake him in the morning, and only at noon does she hear the rumbling coaches of the general and his suite. Chertokutsky, in a panic, gives orders to say that he’s gone for the day and hides out in his carriage. The general and his men arrive. Irritated at this defaulted invitation, the general decides to take a look at the item on his way out. Nothing special about it, he says. But maybe on the inside? His officer unfastens the coverlet:

and there was Chertokutsky, hunched in a preposterous position and wrapped in his dressing-gown. “Ah, here you are!” said the general in surprise. And with that he slammed the door shut, pulled the apron back over Chertokutsky and drove off, with the gentlemen officers.

(p. 157)

Thus does the anecdote end, in a perfect cul-de-sac of Gogolian psychology. The coverlet of the carriage is peeled back to reveal the error, the sin, the little white lie or the absentmindedness that we had hoped to conceal. We are exposed, and the audience departs. The effect here might be compared with the equally abrupt mid-scene blank-out that ends Eugene Onegin, prompted by the sudden appearance of Tatyana’s husband in the doorway. Chertokutsky’s crouching in the carriage resembles that moment in humiliation but exceeds it greatlyin embarrassment.For theproblemwithembarrassmentisthatitcannot be answered. It cannot be made public or washed clean. One can remotely